Gene Simmons

Gene Simmons is the co-founder, bassist, and co-lead singer of KISS. Best known for his on-stage persona as “The Demon,” he became synonymous with the band’s theatrical performances and signature makeup. Offstage, Simmons built KISS into a global brand, with over 30 distinct tours spanning from the 1970s to their more recent “End of the Road World Tour.” He has been recognized for his contributions to music, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Am I allowed to pick anything up?

• 0:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, of course. You can do anything you want. You're very free here.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Did Cash ever play this?

• 0:28Rick Rubin?

  I don't know if Cash played it. Tom Petty definitely played that one. He gave me that one.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, the neck is like, wow.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Very soon and...

• 0:37Rick Rubin?

  Nice to play.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Good sounding instrument. Who would ever start a song like...

• 1:08Speaker 00

  And then you go into the song. The introduction is the bridge. And I will say the only words I know that you'll understand. As a matter of fact, you'll under- It's the harmony to the melody. It's crazy. And that's the introduction to the song. Who does that?

• 1:30Rick Rubin?

  Somebody really who knows what they're doing. Good Lord. Unbelievable.

• 1:36Rick Rubin?

  Wherever that came from, four guys really from the middle of nowhere.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Nowhere. And the name of the place was Liverpool, like Kishka Village. It's got... It's like, when I first heard that, I was bereft. I was like, wow. I couldn't believe it was a place called Liverpool, the most disgusting sounding like, you know, like a vat made of innards. And there is something called a singularity because...

• 2:10Speaker 00

  For instance, Harrison was supposed to be the guy whose writing wasn't on the level of Leonard McCartney. But if you put Harrison in any other band, any other band, and so what have you written lately? Well, let me see, I got, while my guitar gently weeps, I wrote that by myself. I wrote something by myself.

• 2:29Rick Rubin?

  Here Comes the Sun.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, which I think is the number one Beatle streamed song, shockingly. I know he would be great, but in the Beatles, he's just the third guy.

• 2:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, amazing. Tell me about New York around the time that the band was starting, seventies New York. Band started in seventy-three, seventy-four, seventy-three?

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Seventy-three, yeah.

• 2:53Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about nineteen seventy-three in New York. What do you remember? What was going on?

• 2:57Speaker 00

  I was like Jesus, lived at my mother's house because I didn't want to spend money and all that stuff. That's how we know he was Jewish, by the way. Lived with his mother until he was thirty-three years old.

• 3:12Rick Rubin?

  How old were you, though, in seventy?

• 3:14Speaker 00

  I was fifty-six, no, in seventy-three, I was twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-three.

• 3:22Rick Rubin?

  So you're a kid?

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:24Rick Rubin?

  And everybody in the band's about the same age?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  I was the oldest. Paul was twenty, Stanley was twenty or twenty-one, and the other two guys, Ace and Peter, were no, actually, Peter Chris was older than I was, so he must have been twenty-three years old or so, twenty-three. So he must have been twenty-five, twenty-six. He'd already been in another band called Chelsea, which had a record out that didn't do well. Paul and I were in a previous band called Wicked Lester. We had a record that was finished for Epic and was not released. We bought the record back, gave Epic forty-four thousand dollars,

• 4:08Speaker 00

  which at that time was a lot of money because in retrospect, I don't want to be the Doobie Brothers or Three Dog Night. It was that kind of band. Nothing wrong with those bands.

• 4:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  We wanted to be Anglophiles, you know, kind of.

• 4:23Rick Rubin?

  Inspired by the English stuff.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, the way the instruments sounded and what they sang about was clearly not American stuff. Yes, there were pop songs and so on, and we all love those, but when you started Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, kind of, who's Ruby Tuesday? The names of the bands were so ethereal, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull and all this. I mean, it's clearly English, but it sounded like another, clearly culture, but reality or something. We were mesmerized by it, starting off with The Beatles. So, well, first thing is both Paul and I, who

• 5:09Speaker 00

  share a common background.

• 5:11Rick Rubin?

  How'd you meet Paul?

• 5:14Speaker 00

  I had written songs, delusionally by myself, taught myself a few chords, C, F, G, you know, those things, and wrote very poppy, terrible Beatles-inspired melodies. My uncle is a raft, and he always keeps me floating. He is so good to me. He treats me tenderly. Melodies like that with the stupidest McCartney-esque kind of lyrics. And went Eskimo Sun. Eskimo Sun, you shine at me. Mother's love, far as the eyes can

• 5:56Speaker 00

  see. Six months, love is here. You know, these kinds of Beatlesque things. And went shopping, went knocking on doors, did a demo, and thought of myself as a solo artist. Of course, in those days, I was Gene Klein. That ain't rock. You know, dress British, think Yiddish.

• 6:21Rick Rubin?

  Did you ever play shows as Gene Klein with acoustic guitar or otherwise?

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Yes, in high school, places like that. And at the same time, I was studying to be a teacher. I did, in fact, teach sixth grade and Spanish Harlem for a short time.

• 6:39Rick Rubin?

  How was that experience?

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Teaching?

• 6:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Both my roommates in college were black. And I wanted to do that on purpose. I wanted to confront. You know, it was one of those introspective times. It was post hippie movement and people were thinking about within, words like that, which the generation before never thought, what do you mean, within? And I grew up Jewish in a white world and knew a little bit of antisemitism, but not a lot. My mother, however, was a survivor at 14 years of age of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. So my best friends during preschool, fifth grade, sixth grade and all that,

• 7:26Speaker 00

  were black kids because I loved black music. And the first music I heard was pre Beatles, Chuck Berry. And as I sit here saying Chuck Berry, what a strange world it is because I actually did the eulogy for Chuck's

• 7:42Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  funeral, unplanned or anything. And nobody else was there, no McCartney, no Keith Richards. I don't know why. But I happened to be in the same place and wound up just bawling like a child with his open casket. At any rate, the first music I heard was Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fat Domino. Fell in love with that stuff. Then, of course, when the Beatles came in, my mind was blown. And sure enough, as I dug into the Beatles, they were doing cover versions. Motown, Chuck Berry, and so the Stones, they all did that. And I went, ah, that is cool. And that does translate to white boys and all that.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  So the beginning of the seventies was a very pivotal cultural time. Right at the sixties gave teenagers a lot of power. The vote, they had discretionary monies and all of a sudden, you know, young people shouldn't be hurt. You didn't care about teenagers in the fifties. Yeah. Once the pill came in, women of age and sometimes even underage were having sex, not necessarily to get married, just they enjoyed it too. And the civil rights movement, you know, while you're busy leading your also happy lives,

• 9:08Speaker 00

  we're remnants of the slave world. And my grandfather was a slave and it's a different world, a different culture, black culture. And in the southern states, you were acutely aware that they couldn't even go to school, black folks. Vietnam War was winding down and there was a lot of tumult, using big words like gymnasium, where there was an old generation that, you know, America'd love it or leave it. And sort of the end of the hippie movement quickly got over the Dr. Timothy drop in, drop out, all that stuff.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  I was thinking, okay, drop out, but out of what? What's the alternative? I never got the answer to that. I'll just, don't be a part of it, just live off the lab.

• 9:59Rick Rubin?

  Drop into what?

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Well, how do you pay the rent? How do you do that? I rejected that whole lifestyle, although still kept my eye on British music. So what happened in New York that never happened before, during, or since, is the glitter movement, the Brats, the harlots of Forty Second Street, clearly the New York Dolls. A lot of these bands that never made it, New York Dolls unfortunately never made it.

• 10:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Started to dress up androgynous glitter.

• 10:32Rick Rubin?

  You think it was inspired by David Bowie or did it come from somewhere else?

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Hardly, but clearly inspired by the English bands. Their Satanic Majesties request, you know, you'd see, you'd see these albums in the English. Dressing up, unlike the American bands, you know, that we had the Grateful Dead. They had the crazy world of Arthur Brown.

• 10:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  And so the New York scene were these skinny, small kids, you know, people in their early twenties, dressing up, wearing, you know, Plant is wearing women's tops and not afraid to do, you know, semi feminine kind of physicality on stage, the androgyny of it, although clearly they were heterosexual. And so all those mores, not eels, were being toyed with. And a lot of the New York bands, including the Dolls and others, were playing around with wearing lipstick and teasing their hair and, and wearing crop tops, you know, little girls outfits and stuff.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  But singing harder, stonely kind of lyrics, talking about drugs and semi punk before punk lyrics were going out, they feel like outsiders and that very much appealed to us. So Paul and I had formed this Wicked Lester Band that was very pop.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  And we didn't like it because the thing that we liked was that English music, the Kinks and the Stones. The American bands just weren't writing that kind of music and the American bands didn't look that way. The English bands had, I mean, especially Page and Zeppelin and those bands, the guitar was worn way down on the crotch and they'd hit a chord and for no reason whatsoever, the hand would swing up in the air. And a lot of these guys would do the Jesus Christ pose like that. American bands didn't do that.

• 12:33Rick Rubin?

  It was more theatrical.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Theatrical, grand. It was glamorous.

• 12:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  And in those days, you got your sense of what was going on in magazines. So new magazines came out, Circus and Raves, and it was in full color. And you really got a chance to see what these bands were. Needless to say, you were attracted to the English bands, not the Three Dog Night.

• 13:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  And I knew some of the guys and stuff. One guy had like an Italian waiter's mustache and everything. They just, it was not like, yeah, let's be in a band and grow our mustaches. That's not what you wanted to do. You look at Page and Plant, you go, I want to do that. And it's funny, when I heard Zeppelin first, when I first went into college, I was convinced this was a white girl who was doing an impression of Janis Joplin.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  You know, way up there. I thought it was a girl with a kind of a raspy voice. I never imagined a guy could sing that high. And it's so funny, after all this time, I can sit here and remember that first time I heard Zeppelin. And then many years later, Jimmy Page becomes a friend. Like, how does that work?

• 13:52Rick Rubin?

  Amazing. Life's incredible.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  So incredible. And I mean, your journey coming from Run DMC and then Beastie Boys and you. I read up on you, Ruben, insisting you put guitars in with the rap and do that and combining Run DMC with Aerosmith. I mean, great, great stuff that left to its own devices would have probably gone down familiar roads. It's the pushing against the walls that makes it like, whoa, what? What is that?

• 14:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  And Yoko still doesn't belong on any stage, anywhere. Not with Chuck Berry and John Lennon on the same stage. You saw that footage, right?

• 14:36Rick Rubin?

  I don't think so.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  John Lennon and Yoko were co-hosting The Mike Douglas Show, an afternoon variety show.

• 14:43Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  That was our first TV show as well, and it was a big deal.

• 14:47Rick Rubin?

  Mike Douglas?

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:49Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Four o'clock in the afternoon, nationwide, when mom was home.

• 14:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  And they had comedians and that kind of stuff. And they did rock and roll. And for one week, John Lennon and Yoko were co-hosting. And Lennon, because he was such aficionado of the founding fathers, brought Chuck Berry on. And he wanted to play with Chuck Berry, you know, like who didn't? And they did. Not rehearsing. And Yoko is right near John, bless her. I don't know how to describe it, you know, just oral madness. Nothing to do with melody, rhythm, thinking of, ah! Almost like Dr. Yano's scream therapy. You know, you put somebody in, get your anger out and just go, ah!

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Like that. And you can see it on YouTube. There's a close up of Chuck Berry's eyes just wide open like a deer in the headlights. What the hell is that? And he's looking at Lennon. Lennon's just going along with it. I don't know why. At any rate, it was a magical time because the pill was around, girls were, let's say, friendlier. You could wake up with one or two young ladies whose names you never bothered to learn. It was pre-AIDS, pre, what does it all mean? Where's this going? Do I have my mother's hips?

• 16:19Rick Rubin?

  It was the sexual revolution.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, we just thought of it like, boy, are we having a lot of fun. On a guy's point of view. Girls may have a different point of view, but I can only speak for heterosexual male point of view. And so we decided to put together the band, Paul and I, that we had never seen on stage.

• 16:43Rick Rubin?

  What you imagined you'd wanna see.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Wanted, yeah. Because the bands we saw, we loved. Loved Townsend smashing guitars. Wasn't about love the songs, but smashing guitars? What's that about? And you're seeing Keith Moon destroying his drums. The American bands simply did not do that. It was, and Hendrix came out of that school. Jimmy James and the Flames and all that, they couldn't make any headway. He goes to England and all of a sudden this guy's on the floor humping his guitar, singing it on fire, playing the guitar over his head and/or with his teeth. Insane. American bands, we love The Temptations, but I didn't want to be in a band like The Temptations.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  It was too cookie cutter, although great songs.

• 17:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Unequaled.

• 17:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  And so, on a very primitive level, all these New York bands, including Paul and myself, were self-taught, learned how to write, play, and somehow put bands together. Needless to say, none of them, including The Ramones, ever made it.

• 17:54Rick Rubin?

  Were you guys before The Ramones? I don't know what year The Ramones started.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  About six months to a year.

• 18:00Rick Rubin?

  Because there are not so many bands from New York.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  No.

• 18:03Rick Rubin?

  It's you and The Ramones, basically.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Strangely.

• 18:06Rick Rubin?

  Blue Oyster Cult.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. Blue Oyster Cult had more success than The Dolls or The Ramones. They had hit songs. They had "Don't Fear the Reaper."

• 18:16Rick Rubin?

  Again, not necessarily hits, but Velvet Underground were an influential band from New York.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  That's right. Although if you went to Nebraska, they wouldn't know what you were talking about.

• 18:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Influential, there are the critics.

• 18:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  And then there's the real world.

• 18:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  And in the real world, Ramones have much more credibility than Chicago. But Chicago, which started off as the Chicago Transit Authority, had 22 multi-platinum albums in a row.

• 18:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Where each one was a Roman numeral.

• 18:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  So, is it of the people, for the people, by the people? Or do a few elites, who actually can read and write well for magazines, whose opinions counts more? And I never cared one way or the other, even though I had a degree and I started teaching sixth grade. And I was the assistant to the director of the Puerto Rican Interagency Council, made a good living. I was the Man Friday for Vogue magazine. I was the only guy on the floor.

• 19:21Rick Rubin?

  How'd that happen?

• 19:23Speaker 00

  I'm an only child to my mother and I've always, for some reason, been...

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Fearless. I don't care about rejection. Because I'm delusional about myself. I know I'm not the best looking guy in the world. I know I'm not the smartest looking guy in the world. I know that logically, but not in my.

• 19:44Rick Rubin?

  Do you think it's because your mother made you believe otherwise? Like to your mother, you were.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  The king.

• 19:50Rick Rubin?

  The king. Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Not only that, but before we had phones in bathrooms, I'd always worked. By the time I was twenty something, I saved up $23,000 after tax, which in those days, you know, today would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when Paul and I first met, after work, I'd go back to my mother's house because I didn't want to pay rent. And if you meet a chick, you go to a Holiday Inn. It's like, what's the problem? Save the money. And Paul would immediately know by about six o'clock, I'm back at my mother's house and the phone would ring in the kitchen. And so help me God, my hand to God. Paul is basically asking, can I talk to Jean?

• 20:32Speaker 00

  And my mother, in her thick Hungarian accent, she goes, no, no, no, no. He was working. He's no, no, no, no. He goes, well, is he home? Yeah, yes. Well, can I talk to him? No. He goes, well, not. He goes. My mother would say, the king is on the throne.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Literally.

• 20:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Yep. And she would always ask me, how is the orchestra? It's just, just the sweet innocence of, you know, just seeing. And my mother, bless her, never, she passed at 94, never understood. We started making money pretty fast and quite a bit of it. Never understood what my working hours were or who was paying me and where did I work? You know, because jobs, you make money, somebody pays you money and stuff. This vague idea that somehow the money came from people was a bizarre idea. And I, and my work ethic

• 21:37Speaker 00

  and my moral compass and everything I am is my mother. I remember.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Even before seventy six, you know, we we made millions right away. And in those days, taxes were lower. And the cost of living was, so a million dollars was a lot of money. Maybe, I don't know, ten or fifteen million by today's standards. And I remember giving my mother, in those days, checks. Were the way you transferred lots of money. Before the rules about you can't carry more than ten thousand dollars. It was just, that's how you did it. Either cash or checks. I remember giving my mother a large check with lots of zeros on it. And she didn't understand what that was.

• 22:29Rick Rubin?

  It was too much money for her to conceive of.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:33Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  And.

• 22:34Rick Rubin?

  And you're still twenty two, twenty three, twenty four.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Twenty three.

• 22:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  And I basically told her, I'm gonna go with you to the bank. We're gonna set up accounts and everything. And you can buy any house you want, any price, everything else. And she just couldn't fathom what that was. Because from surviving, not living through, surviving World War Two, where Europe is devastated, where our family and half the world's Jewish population, two million Catholics, two million gay people, the Romani, the Gypsies, anybody who was unacceptable to the Nazis, were incinerated in the concentration camps. And my mother survived at fourteen. So from her perspective,

• 23:27Speaker 00

  having things was not the important thing. To this day, I don't, I mean, I have lots of houses all over the place.

• 23:36Rick Rubin?

  It's more about surviving.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Yes, I was always afraid of being poor.

• 23:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  And always wanted.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Lots of money. I'm still motivated by money, success, and raw power. But in parentheses, what it's really about is you don't want to be vulnerable to poverty and everything else. And I mean, the byproduct of being a reasonably good guy is I can support 1,400 kids in Zimbabwe, which I do, and give to multiple charities. But at the core of it, that's only possible because you make a lot of money. And in real terms, a poor person never gave me a job. And I still live by the principle that,

• 24:28Speaker 00

  you know, Jeff Bezos is a good guy, he gives away a lot of money, and Buffett and everybody else, there actually are hundreds of billions of dollars, but they give away a lot of their money, including Elon. Elon gets a bad rap. He does amazing amounts. So let's say you, Rick Rubin, are worth a trillion dollars. And let's say you're not. Let's say you're a complete arrogant, selfish asshole who only wants to spend money on himself. So on the surface of it, we have this preconceived notion that, ah, what good are you on the planet? Actually, even if you never gave a penny to charity, even if you never helped anybody, or just were totally self-absorbed,

• 25:13Speaker 00

  the fact that you're building a 50,000 square foot home and have 10 houses and build yachts actually provides people with a chance to feed their families. All those people that work for your arrogant, selfish, self-absorbed ass, you're still making the planet a better place. Now, of course, the best part of that is to work hard, make an awful lot of money, and create jobs and give to charity and all that stuff. But even if you were arrogant, never gave you're better for this world, because without the rich, this is not an easy pill to swallow, because I came from nothing, and my mother made $37.50 a week.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Where we would save every slice of bread and we had four dishes. Four. There was no such thing as breakfast, dinner, whatever was in the fridge. That's what you ate and you were happy to eat it. To this day, the bane of my waistline is if there's crusty old bread. I just had it this morning with a little cream cheese or peanut butter and jam. I'm thrilled. My daughter went, Sophie, who's enormously successful, by the way, in sound scan and all that stuff. She's got hundreds of songs wrote for Rick Rubin, producers, writes all this stuff. She went to Cordon Bleu, the cooking school in France,

• 26:41Speaker 00

  and tried to tell me what she was, you know, the frog's legs and all. I've gone, what? He goes, yeah, well, there's a rabbit. You put it on the thing, you gut it open and you cook it because mother nature. I go, no. No. So there is such a thing as having the right thing at the right place and the right time. Making your own luck is an interesting idea, but it doesn't quite work. Because if the Beatles, for example, with electric instruments existed during one of the great musical times, the Renaissance,

• 27:22Speaker 00

  people wouldn't understand what the electric instruments were or that kind of song structure.

• 27:28Rick Rubin?

  It was the right time and the right place.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Yes, it's the culture has to be right behind you so that you can be slightly ahead of it. Because when I first heard the Beatles, it was a revelation.

• 27:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  And yet they were still dealing with those eight notes and one, four, five chords and so on. But the visual part of it, people hardly ever point to.

• 27:54Rick Rubin?

  But you were thinking about that from day one?

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Immediately. Because I loved The Love and Spoonful and Sly and the Family Storm, huge fan.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  But what is it that makes a rock star? Which is the only musical form that's actually, the genre is actually a verb, rock on. You can't soul on, or folk on, or country and western on. And if somebody in politics or architecture is really good, you say, "That guy's a rock star." You can't say, "That guy's a hip hop star." It means nothing.

• 28:36Rick Rubin?

  That hip hop stars call themselves rock stars.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And that just happens naturally in culture, black culture, white culture, any culture. And so I want my sense of the rock star thing. I didn't come from the Dylan, or Springsteen, or any of that school, which is, you know, you have a something inside of you. You want to impart a message or something. Ah, just wanted to be rich and famous and get lots of chicks. Without any reservations, unapologetic. Because what I saw, when I saw the Beatles, and the girls especially, were going insane in a primal way.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  I said, "I have to have that thing." And I firmly believe that when Lennon, McCartney especially, were strumming and coming up with those songs, so many, hundreds and hundreds of songs, and only seven years, I don't know how that happened. I don't think they were thinking about, "What's the secret of life?" Or, "I want to change society." Or, it was just "moon, June, spoon." "That kind of sounds good. I hope we can pay the rent." That's it.

• 29:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. It was really devotion to music. They just loved this thing.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  They loved this. And the thing was a multi-headed beast, because they loved rockabilly.

• 30:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  They loved Buck Owens.

• 30:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, country.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  And Motown.

• 30:07Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  And blues. And all the English bands had this kind of understanding. American music. Strangely, America invented...

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Clearly from black people that music came blues, hip hop, the white version, rock and roll, which means having sex. People don't know that. Let me rock and roll you all night long. You know, let me have sex with you all night, rolling around. And, and people go, oh, yeah, rock means sex. And we may have invented all those musical genres, but what the British did with it? Forget about it.

• 30:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  And it's a very strange island. I know there are a few, there's Wales and, and Scotland and so on. But that's small island of people created the biggest bands on the planet, up until Taylor, who's a phenomenon all by herself. The Beatles and the Stones, and it just got hundreds and hundreds of these bands. And some of them were completely different. If you listen to Yes, it has nothing to do sonically with Led Zeppelin.

• 31:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Which has nothing to do with, I don't know, Cat Stevens. And they all coexisted at the same time. And I have to say that it was the most varied, under the umbrella of rock, it was the most varied creative period I was ever aware of.

• 31:47Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about songwriting with Paul. When did it start? When did you know it got good?

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Again, I've always been delusional. I am now. And I believe it's a healthy mindset. I mean, if you don't take yourself seriously, but if you're Mike Tyson and you were starting out and you're too short, not heavy enough, and you're, you don't have long arms, how could you possibly envision yourself as the most dangerous boxer who ever stepped in the ring? If you take a look at photos of everybody Tyson fought, it looks like a joke. They're all a foot taller and huge arms, and yet.

• 32:26Rick Rubin?

  The power of belief.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  That's right. It's a, you're, you're so right. This kind of delusional notion. I don't mean that as a negative, just.

• 32:35Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  Reach to the stars.

• 32:37Rick Rubin?

  Because it's unrealistic, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Absolutely right. And that's why not everybody scales the heights. You have to have this. Before it's a reality, hindsight's easy. Ah, you know, because you go, oh, that's how you do it.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  But before you do it, you've got to have

• 32:58Speaker 00

  vision and a delusional belief in yourself. When I first met Paul, I hadn't met. I'd written a few hundred songs on my own.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Almost all of them terrible, a few survived.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  I met Paul because my sixth grade chum, Stephen Carnell, with whom I'd written two songs with, he came up with a riff and I had melody and I did the rest myself. And both those songs, we recorded as Kiss and, you know, they did well. He was the original guitar player in Wicked Lester, but unfortunately didn't have the goods. But through him, I met Paul Stanley. And Paul Stanley, when he first met me, I didn't mean it, but didn't like me a lot. That's fair to say. Because I couldn't imagine that anyone else wrote songs.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  I thought, again, delusionally, I figured something out that regular people didn't. I mean, there were Lennon, McCartney and Jagger Ridge, those guys. But they weren't real people, they're up there.

• 34:10Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  But walking down the street, I didn't know anyone who could play guitar or come up with melodies or write your own songs. I was crazy. And Stephen Carnell introduced me to this guy who was not yet Paul Stanley. And I remember saying, let me hear what you got. And he sat down

• 34:35Speaker 00

  and he played a song called Sunday Driver. It goes. Let me be your Sunday driver, let me be your Monday man.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Take you anywhere, just as fast as I can.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Doesn't matter what you wanna do. It doesn't matter where you wanna go. You just gotta decide, girl, and then you let me know.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  But let's get know you wanna know, know.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Like that, I'm going, wow. Let me be your Sunday driver, let me be your Monday man. That's really good.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  And I'm going, oh, wow. And then he said, what do you got? I'm going, what have I got?

• 35:42Speaker 00

  This is fucking embarrassing.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  My uncle, my uncle is a raft and he always keeps me floating. He is so good to me. He treats me tenderly. It doesn't matter who you are.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  My uncle is a raft. What the fuck is that? My uncle is a raft and he was just looking at me like deadpan going, uh huh.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Because there was nobody around to say, no, put that away, that's not a good one. Because, you know, we all have to.

• 36:32Rick Rubin?

  But the Kings could do that song, My Uncle is a Raft.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Yes, that's where it came. That's really good.

• 36:37Rick Rubin?

  I hear it, Ray Davies.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  That's what it is, it goes. Well, he wakes up in the morning.

• 36:45Rick Rubin?

  It's in that spirit.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Comes back home five thirty, gets a train when they're done. He's a well-respected man about talk, doing the best thing so conservative for me.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  That's where I got it from.

• 37:05Rick Rubin?

  Great. Work.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  But, well-respected man is, was a cultural, you know, kind of pomp commentary on something. The fuck does my uncle is a raft and he always keeps me floating?

• 37:20Rick Rubin?

  You were kidding.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  Yep. And I didn't know. There was nobody, there was no Rick Rubin around saying, well, maybe not that one.

• 37:28Rick Rubin?

  So then, right from that meeting of Paul, did you guys start?

• 37:31Speaker 00

  No. Paul had joined Stephen Cornell and one other guy who was playing keyboards, Marty Cohen, and a drummer who I'd played with. And they had, they didn't have a bass player. And Paul was a real Anglophile. He had a Gibson, but they didn't have amplifiers. And when I was in college, I had a side band and I saved all my money. So I bought two Marshall stacks with 200 watt Marshall heads. Nobody had those. And then Stephen Cornell and I decided to put a band together. We didn't have a name.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  And we put an ad in Village Voice, which at that time was a free newspaper. And one of the ads was looking for a guitar player and blah, blah, blah. And we saw Paul called the phone number we had, which was in the rehearsal hall. And I remember answering the phone. And what's your name? Stanley, you know, so and so. And I didn't recognize the name. And we were talking with each other. Uh, we're looking for, you know, lead guitar player. And Paul says on the other phone, I can play okay lead, but I'm more rhythm player and I can sing.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  I am so sorry, looking for guitar. I didn't know I was talking to Paul. So there was another missed opportunity. And then it was Stephen Cornell, who was in this fledgling band with me, which would become Wicked Lester. He says, why don't I call this guy Paul that I, you know, he sings great and he can play rhythm guitar and I'll play lead. So we had a second chance. Like, who gets a second chance? And when Paul and I got together, he, you know, slowly warmed up to the idea, because I did have other material that we started doing. And we started,

• 39:28Speaker 00

  you know, writing together. He would come in.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  With a finished song.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  Like.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  And I said, "Where'd you get that, the Rolling Stones?"

• 39:58Speaker 00

  And I said, "Well, that's really good."

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Put a beat behind it. I like the chords, the way they sound, but you know, it's not memorable. So the basslines that I wound up playing, because I wasn't trained bass, McCartney was a big influence. I just played what was in my mind. So I started doing.

• 40:29Rick Rubin?

  Okay, the hook.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  That became the, yeah, the beginning.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  And so it was those chords. But the chords only came in during the verse. It began with my bass riff and during the verses.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  And that became a thing. We recognized, all of us, that what I was naturally playing.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  It was a bassline that I was doing for a song Paul had called "Love her all I can." But then I said, "Why don't you guys play my bassline?"

• 41:25Speaker 00

  So while that's going and had drums upon the back of it, it had an interesting syncopated thing. And the chords got out of the way. So a lot of the songs, the early songs, either Paul and I would come in with our own things and the riffs.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  The riffs.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Then Ace would put.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Against.

• 42:04Rick Rubin?

  Adding the harmony.

• 42:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  And.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  And what sounds stupid on acoustic guitar, played loudly, kind of goes, wow, it's kind of like Cream, and we had harmonies.

• 42:25Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about up until making the first album. So, gigs, did you guys do shows?

• 42:34Speaker 00

  We, Paul and I got a loft, 10th and 23rd Street. I had worked at that time as the assistant to the director of the Puerto Rican Interagency Council, because I could type 90 words a minute, I could fix mimeograph, hexograph, rexograph. So I was a one-man office. When you had to do copies of anything, take a note. In fact, before that, I was a dictaphone typist from 8:00 PM until 8:00 AM at Williamson at Williamson, a law firm on Wall Street. So after work, I'd lock up the office. It was a government-funded research and demonstration project. I'd take the subway to downtown 15th Street,

• 43:17Speaker 00

  and I was the checkout guy at a Jewish deli.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  So you take people's money, ring it up, but I could eat as much as I want, and I can take doggy bags with me. So, make extra money.

• 43:29Rick Rubin?

  Food was taken care of?

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Free. So I could eat whatever I wanted, and boy, did I punish those cheesecakes, the blueberry cheesecake. And then after my stint at the, a few hours, and by 9:00 or 9:30, I'd take the subway or walk to 23rd Street, and we'd start rehearsing at night.

• 43:54Rick Rubin?

  Would you be exhausted, or no?

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Of course, but you're two years old, you just don't have that, you just go.

• 44:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Pick up food where you could, and you just go, go, go.

• 44:04Rick Rubin?

  Would you say all of the work was to get you to the rehearsal, or no? Everything was the same? It was all just work?

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Money.

• 44:16Rick Rubin?

  You were driven by money?

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Still am.

• 44:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and even the band from the beginning was only about money?

• 44:25Speaker 00

  You have to add chicks.

• 44:27Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  Because you didn't, I and no one else in the band and no one else I ever met or admired in other bands ever talked about the ethereal or poetic nature of,

• 44:42Speaker 00

  I don't know, Bob Dylan, let's say, it was a higher life form.

• 44:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  The glitter movement was amazing.

• 44:50Rick Rubin?

  Did you ever see any of those bands? Did you ever see the Dolls Play Live?

• 44:53Speaker 00

  We opened for them. We opened for them.

• 44:55Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about that.

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Three shows or so. Paul and I went to see them at the Hotel Diplomat in New York before their record had already come out. They came out before us, about six months.

• 45:07Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:09Rick Rubin?

  Were you already in full makeup?

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:11Rick Rubin?

  Right from the beginning?

• 45:12Speaker 00

  The very first show, we played, we were fourth on the bill, 1973, New Year's Eve, it was Kiss, Teenage Lust, Iggy Pop, and Blue Oyster Cult.

• 45:24Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  At the Academy of Music for 3,000 people. That became the Palladium.

• 45:31Rick Rubin?

  That sounded like a great show.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  Yes, in those days, there was no separation. I mean, I saw Albert King, the Chambers Brothers, and Poco on the same bill. We could see the Woody.

• 45:45Rick Rubin?

  Just good music.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Music. Woody Herman Orchestra and Led Zeppelin on the same bill.

• 45:50Rick Rubin?

  Wow. How did the first, um?

• 45:53Speaker 00

  New Year's Eve show, by the third song,

• 45:58Speaker 00

  my hair caught fire. This was New Year's Eve, Firehouse, because I, you know, we got ourselves a manager, a guy who directed a late night TV show called Flipside. That was in the studio. They'd bring John Lennon or record label heads and. It would be live music in a recording studio.

• 46:18Rick Rubin?

  How did you find him or how did he find you?

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Oh, I found everybody, the mountain incumbent to you, Mohammed.

• 46:25Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  I had the offices at the Puerto Rican Interagency Council. After everybody left, I bought, I voraciously read Billboard, Record World and Cash Box. Every issue, you did too.

• 46:38Rick Rubin?

  I did.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  And then they had the year end issue and they listed every single management company, every single. And when the band was put together before anything, we rented out the Diplomat Hotel on 43rd Street and got bigger bands, bigger local bands than us.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Street punk, local band before the punk era, they were called street punk. And they had a good song called Master of Flash, one good song. So locally, they meant more than Kiss. Kiss was a new band, Untried and Luger, a small band. And I wrote up the contract, you'll be there, there will be amplifiers and the sound system, all of it rented. We'll sell tickets and everything and you get a subtotal of $125. Said that and you show up at, you know, eight o'clock, that's when you play Luger and you get 75 or 100, whatever it is.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  And what they didn't know, they assumed, you know, what happens when you assume, makes an ass out of you and me, is that we all understood they were the headlines. Well, Kiss, this new band was going on at 9:30. So we invited, I put together the press kit myself up at the offices of Puerto Rican Interagency Council, bought Madella envelopes, printed up the stuff there in the office and sent it to every person in the record industry, including, by the way, the director producer of Flipside, because it was a music show. And we were looking for managers and everything and a few people came down.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  And it said, heavy metal masters before people use the term, the William Burroughs, heavy metal.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  And we put on our own makeup. And Paul and his friends actually went out and bought glue and glitter. In those days, you could buy multicolored glitter. And Paul and his friends outlined the Kiss logo on a T-shirt in glue, and then dropped the glitter on there and let it drop. And then hand it out, just like Frank Sinatra, the Bobby Soxers at the Paramount Theater, because we were all students of how do you create something that's not going to come to you? And Colonel Tom Parker used to pay these teenage girls to be in the front going, "Ah!"

• 49:13Speaker 00

  And we literally got everybody's girlfriends or any pretty girl that we could. And here, put this T-shirt on and be in the front row. And when we come on, "Ah!" So one of the industry people that came to see us was this producer, director. There were record companies there as well. Windfall Records and a few others. And Paul and I had already walked out of the Epic Records contract with Uke and Lester. We just didn't believe in it. And Bill Acorn, I remember, right after we came off the stage, I went, people were still milling around because everybody, the guys are all trying to get laid and everything. And the girls are staying there if they didn't have boyfriends. You know, it was all, it was social.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  And I remember a, one of the photographers, a girl, who was in the front taking photos, you know, of us while we were on stage, just like real bands. And it was a pretty good sounding hall, and we came off well. We did "Firehouse" and all those songs that would later become popular within a year. And I remember this guy coming in, and I was sitting by the mixing console in makeup with homemade glittery pants made out of...

• 50:34Speaker 00

  Like what your grandmother would put on a glittery thing that she sews at home, but not well made.

• 50:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Black and black leather jacket and a black T-shirt and all that. And puffed up hair and makeup. And I'm sitting by the, and this guy Bill O'Coin comes in. And as soon as he's coming, I grabbed this girl Regina with a camera around her. And she happened to be blessed in that special way. And so I put her on my lap and was, you know, moving my lap up and down so that you would see God's gifts bouncing. And I mean, Shakespeare said, "The world is a stage and we're all just playing." Uh, they were lifted and separated, as I recall, and pointing in his general direction.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  And when he sat down, she's, you know, a guy with the makeup and the thing who on stage was sticking his tongue out and the girls are screaming and stuff. And of course, Paul was the better looking guy and, and this girl on stage and photos and the room is full because they, they were coming to see the other bands, not us.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. But we made all the money, made over $750 because I think the entrance was $50 or something like that. So you pay the other bands, here's a hundred, here's 75, hotel rental. And the rest of it was ours. We actually made some money. And O'Coin's looking at this and goes, "Uh-oh, there's something going on here that I haven't even..." So he immediately called, we later found out, this guy Neil Bogart, who was a record company and, you know, semi legend, even in the early days, he had yummy, yummy, yummy, I got love in my tummy, the 1910 Fruit Gum Company.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  But he also had The Impressions, Percy Mayfield, you know, legitimate stuff, black music, bubble gum. It was a form of music. And the Lemon Pipers, listen while I play, yeah, yeah, yeah, my green tambourine. And he told them about it and this guy Bogart was starting a new label.

• 52:47Rick Rubin?

  Casablanca.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  That's right. But originally, I have to say, I'm guilty of it. He was going to call the label Emerald City. I remember, by the way, once he was gonna sign us, he asked me in the office, Bill O'Conne's office, which was called Rocksteady, he created that, before the Aretha song.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  "What do you think of Emerald City?" I said, "I don't like it." And I was completely unqualified.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  And I don't know if I said it, or if he said it, but what about Casablanca? "Oh yeah, they had that thing, 'A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.'" Yeah, that's cool. And we were the very first band signed to Casablanca Records.

• 53:34Rick Rubin?

  I didn't know that.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, before disco, before anything else.

• 53:37Rick Rubin?

  Because we think of Casablanca mainly as a disco label, with the exception of Kiss.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  That's right. After Kiss, I did find a group called Angel, and convinced Bogart to sign them. And they were impressive and good-looking and all that, they just never made it. But the real money for Bogart came from Donna Summer, which was massive. They had The Parliament's, a version of it, because they were on three different labels and were sued by everybody. Parliament Funkadelic was on West wind, The Parliament's, "I just wanna testify what your love has done to me. Get up for the downstroke, everybody get up."

• 54:22Speaker 00

  And Parliament's, Donna Summer, the Village People, I mean, they had huge, huge hits, not just for one record, lots of records. But we were the first.

• 54:32Rick Rubin?

  Wow. The only rock band, really?

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:36Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  The only rock band out of New York that made any kind of noise, ever.

• 54:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  That could play stadiums and do that, no other New York band.

• 54:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  And it's funny when you take a look at it. The Beatles didn't come from London. They came from Liverpool.

• 54:55Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  And U2 didn't come from, I don't know, wherever the capital city is. All these small pockets. Where, I don't know if it's the underclass. Grunge didn't start in a major area. It was like in a rainy other area. And when you think of Nashville, everybody's from Nashville. No, not really. They're up in the hills.

• 55:20Rick Rubin?

  They come to Nashville.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  They come there.

• 55:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  From the hills. They have the gestation period, this development thing is off somewhere else. I mean, Elvis didn't come from New York.

• 55:33Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  The geniuses of managers, whatever, would never think of a white, good-looking boss, okay, I'm gonna give you the DNA. Here's what you gotta do. Go to black churches, listen to gospel, and integrate that into do this and do that and then do that. No, it happened. The Beatles were real. All that DNA from different things, they made that mixture. And Elvis did that gospel music with white, little country, little gospel. They invented themselves. And that's what makes it authentic, that it wasn't some grand scheme. Now, there's nothing wrong with the Monkees. I was a major.

• 56:11Rick Rubin?

  I love the Monkees too.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  But that was created.

• 56:14Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  And it does not, the music does. The people does not, do not stand the test of time because you know they were actors. They didn't write their own thing. Except Mike Nesmith did write two songs. Did you know? The Stone Ponies, Different Drums.

• 56:30Rick Rubin?

  Oh, that's a great song.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Mike Nesmith.

• 56:33Rick Rubin?

  I love that song.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Mary Mary wrote that for Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

• 56:37Rick Rubin?

  Great song.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Mary Mary.

• 56:41Rick Rubin?

  Great song.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  You know where he made all his money? I am just a bucket full of trivia. His mother invented whiteout.

• 56:51Rick Rubin?

  Pretty good.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  You know what whiteout is?

• 56:53Rick Rubin?

  Yes, I do.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Kids today have no idea what that was.

• 56:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, you don't need it now because you can erase on the computer. So you don't need whiteout.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  You don't even need your fingers. You just talk to Siri.

• 57:08Rick Rubin?

  I think we're gonna listen to a song or two from each album, from the first album until the solo albums. So the very first album is just called Kiss. I will play a song from the first Kiss album.

• 58:27Rick Rubin?

  The riff.

• 59:19Rick Rubin?

  The

• 59:28Rick Rubin?

  What do you remember about that?

• 59:29Speaker 00

  First of all, when we recorded the first record at Bell Sound, there were no 24-track machines. 1973.

• 59:37Rick Rubin?

  It was 16-track?

• 59:39Speaker 00

  16-track. 16 tracks. And just a few years-

• 59:43Rick Rubin?

  Where's Bell Sound? I don't know that place.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Down the same street as Studio 54.

• 59:48Rick Rubin?

  54th Street.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  On one end of Studio 54, closer to 7th Avenue, is Bell Sound, no longer there. I remember at the same time, upstairs, the other floor, they were recording the soundtrack for Lords of Flatbush with Stallone. They also had The Warriors later there. They were all wearing makeup. And so that song started off as one of the songs I did as a solo before I met Paul called Stanley the Parrot. I know, it sounds like stupid. Taken from, kind of like Boris the Spider.

• 1:00:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Look who's climbing on my wall.

• 1:00:36Rick Rubin?

  Boris the Spider.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, Boris the Spider. I thought, you know, almost childlike. And I started with these chords.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Then it goes- Stanley the parrot regards himself as less than a man. He still regrets it, even though he knows that he can. Summer is the time for making them. Stanley doesn't think he can. He now regards himself as quite a man.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  And then it went into this other section.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  And Paul heard that song. When we first got together, we'd play a lot of tunes for each other. He says, "That is a god awful song." I go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "But I like these chords."

• 1:01:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  I do the same thing to his stuff. I like the chords, you know, because it's...

• 1:01:46Rick Rubin?

  That's what makes a good songwriting partnership, is you make each other better.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  I say the same thing about "We Couldn't Shine Their Shoes," but when Lennon and McCartney were together...

• 1:01:56Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  Nobody touched them. Here's the thing that just pisses me off at how good. Not even good, geniuses. Guys come into a band, say, "Hey, I got a new song. What is it called?" "It's called 'Yesterday.'" "How's it go?" "Yesterday..." Oh, there's no introduction, no nothing. The title is the first word, and it's the first thing you hear, without anything. "I got another one. What's it called?" "Michelle." "How's it go?" "Michelle." "Oh, my God." And then you go, "I got another one. What's it called?" "She Loves You." "How's it go?" "She loves you, yeah." I go, "How did they do that?" "What's the other one?" "Eleanor Rigby." "Eleanor Rigby." Actually, they did... It was Lennon who put the "I look at all..." That was Lennon's thing.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  And during the making of "Help," because they had "Hard Day's Night," the song. "This man a hard day's night." And that's the name of the movie, and it goes right into that. Richard Lester comes up to the band and says, "Look, we've got a movie called 'Help,' because we like the title. We need a song called 'Help.'" And I read different things. This is what happened. During lunch, Lennon went off, and he wrote "Help" in a half hour. And when you take a look at it, it was a song about a guy who had close to manic-depressive tendencies. He had real, personal problems. "Help. I need somebody, help, not just anybody. Help.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  You know, I need someone, help." And it's his whole life. "Help me if you can, I'm feeling down, but I do appreciate you being around. Help me if you..." It's just insane, against this...

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  Pop melody was amazing with them answering. When I was young, when I was young, it's just memorable. He goes, how do you like this? It goes like this. Help, I need somebody, help. Oh my God. So what I call a perfect song hardly ever done. Ironically, Charlie Chaplin was a co-writer of one of the other perfect songs. Doesn't depend on introductions, instrumentation, arrangement, or guitar solos, or piano solos. It's just the melody and the lyric and the subject matter. And the song he co-wrote was Smile.

• 1:04:20Rick Rubin?

  Smile though your heart is aching.

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Smile, right there. You're killing, you're killing me with those two. Smile though your heart is aching. Smile though your heart is breaking. And by the way, the great songs like that begin and end with the same song. When you just smile, you know, yesterday, all my trouble. I believe in yesterday. Help, and you see, you know.

• 1:04:44Rick Rubin?

  Simple, super simple.

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  Simple, try to write one like that. And that ends.

• 1:04:49Rick Rubin?

  Impossibly simple.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  Oh my God. And it's not even a chorus the way you think of a chorus. Cause yesterday, for example, it's one word. Yesterday, pregnant pause, pregnant pause, all my trouble. And then the rest of the song begins. It's genius.

• 1:05:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  Must have been the way Salieri in that movie, Amadeus, eventually goes mad. He was the king's musical director and wrote symphonies and operas, well respected. And then he saw this little putz, you know, who would write three minute piano concertos. Mozart wrote it linear. He composed linear as he was playing it, was writing it down. And he did it in front of Salieri, who went insane. And there's a pivotal moment in that movie that is supposedly taken from historical fact. Salieri is in prison, goes angry and every day he would beat his head, which was beaten to a pulp. There's artwork of that.

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  Yes, cursing God. Why did you give this youngling? The genius of music, when I've been devoted to you all my life. What does he had, guy? And he couldn't get over the genius of Mozart.

• 1:06:11Rick Rubin?

  What do you remember about the cover shoot, the first album?

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Joel Brodsky, I remember, I think, was the photographer. We went to him because he did the photography for Strange Days, the

• 1:06:24Rick Rubin?

  The Doors.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  The Doors. We loved that cover. And the Doors were not even on the cover. It was like Circus.

• 1:06:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  There was a strong man.

• 1:06:31Rick Rubin?

  Great cover.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  The vibe of it.

• 1:06:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  There used to be that.

• 1:06:34Rick Rubin?

  I think he did a lot of stuff for Elektra.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Rick Rubin?

  Joel.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  Jack Holtzman and all that.

• 1:06:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  And it's a shame, the art of it is gone. There's no more art considerations and stuff. I used to buy records just because of the album cover. It was a good indication. And bands would torture themselves with artwork and everything. So we walk in, new label, Casablanca and everything. And he says, OK, guys, what kind of ideas do you have? Well, you know, we wear makeup and everything. OK, go off into that room. You've got your stuff over there. Let me see what you've got. And we came out, and I'll never forget this. And he goes, oh, I get it. You're clowns.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  What do you mean? And he sent his assistant. They went downstairs to a kind of a Woolworth or something. And they brought up balloons. And you see his assistant blowing up balloons and everything. And we said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. No, this is serious. We're like Kiss, like the Kiss of Death. He goes, what do you mean? No, we just want to do the album cover like Meet the Beatles, looking straight ahead. And if you take a look at Meet the Beatles, that's what it is. Without, without musical instruments.

• 1:07:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  Just the faces.

• 1:07:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  The record company was furious. Why don't you put the guitars and the drums?

• 1:08:02Rick Rubin?

  How did the Kiss logo come to be?

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  The Kiss logo, first of all, I wanted to call the band. Have seriously fuck. Wanted to be edgy. And the first record would be called It. Like it, the second would be called You. Fuck you. The third record would be called whatever it is, Us. And it all, and it's just on and on. Cool, who are you gonna go see? We're gonna go see Fuck. Yeah, fuck yeah.

• 1:08:34Rick Rubin?

  Pretty punk rock, pretty punk rock idea.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  I didn't know, it just sounded edgy.

• 1:08:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  Fuck, yeah, like, well, no, that's the live record. Fuck, yeah. And of course, everybody thought, no, no, you can't do that. And it was Paul Stanley, who in his Mustang, Ace Fraley and I were in the backseat. Paul was in the front. Peter was already married, so his wife would pick him up. And Paul's driving, scared to death, thought you were gonna die, because he was always horrible driver. And he said, I don't know why, and he can't remember where it came from. He says, hey, how about Kiss? Not semi believing what he was saying. And all of a sudden, we went, wow, and we started talking, you know? Kiss, kiss of death, kiss of this, kiss of that. Wow, that's kind of, wow, it's kind of cool, kind of like glitter and,

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  yeah, and then in those days, I was making the phone calls to clubs and taking care of the biz. Sometimes paying whatever I had to do and whatever. But Paul would be driving the truck, because I couldn't drive until I was 34. And we had this photo enlarged of us as Wicked Lester, because it was a transition. We were Wicked Lester. Even as we, Paul and I got rid of the other guys in the band Wicked Lester, and Peter and Ace joined the band, we were still Wicked Lester, just as a kind of a thing.

• 1:10:00Rick Rubin?

  Like the Yardbirds, same thing happened before Led Zeppelin.

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  The new Yardbirds and all that, yeah. So there's a photo of us, because I got us a gig at Popcorn, which became Coventry. We were the first band to play it right in Woodside in Queens.

• 1:10:19Rick Rubin?

  How many people would have been at that show?

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  You could have fit two or 300, and when we played, there might have been four. Jan Walsh, who was a girl I was seeing at the time, her girlfriend, who was seeing her brother, Lydia Chris, who was Peter Chris's wife, and then one or two other people, that was it. But to us, we were playing Yankee Stadium. You were playing our songs, we're doing it our way.

• 1:10:50Rick Rubin?

  And onstage with lights on you.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  And there's a video.

• 1:10:54Rick Rubin?

  PA system, everything.

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  PA system, makeup, everything. Big Marshall amps, and we have videos of it.

• 1:11:00Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, before anybody was doing that. We wanted to see what that was. Nobody did that stuff.

• 1:11:09Rick Rubin?

  How many shows would you say you did in that first year before going to record?

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

  Four.

• 1:11:13Rick Rubin?

  Total of four?

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  The rest of the time was just rehearsing at the loft. I got a new song, how does it go like that? And just every day playing those songs. I remember we did a version of Go Now.

• 1:11:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  That was by the Moody Blues. That was a cover. You should hear the original version. Anyway, we played at the Amityville, where Jaws was and so on, at this club called The Daisy. Couldn't have had more than 150 people or so. And there's video and music of that.

• 1:11:48Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  Strangely.

• 1:11:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  And a lot of those songs wound up on the first record. And we played the Diplomat Hotel, Coventry.

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  And maybe a charity event, that's it.

• 1:12:04Rick Rubin?

  That's it, and then recording.

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, the deal, as soon as Bill O'Coin, the flipside guy saw us, he called Neil Bogart. We played half hour set at La Tang's tat dancing studio halfway between Bell Sound and Studio 54. It was a very famous choreographer of 40s and 30s movies. And there were mirrors all over the place, which we loved, you know, because we're putting on the makeup and doing. And Neil Bogart came to see us,

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  who was already very successful. Warner Brothers gave him his own label. And he, you gotta give him credit. He saw something in us. We didn't have any hit singles. The first single we had was a song I wrote called "Nothing to Lose." And I came up with this lick.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  Before I had a baby, I didn't know what to say.

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  I thought about the back door.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  I didn't know, it's just, before I had a baby, I tried every way.

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  I thought about the back door. I didn't know what to say, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  But once I got a baby,

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  I tried every way.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  She didn't wanna do it, but she did anyway. Say, baby, please don't refuse.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  You know you got nothing to lose. Lose, lose. You got nothing to lose.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  You got nothing to lose, you got, got. So that was the, because it had a chorus of some kind. But nobody knew that it was about that. Backdoor, and I.

• 1:14:11Rick Rubin?

  Was that the first single?

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:14:13Rick Rubin?

  On Casablanca?

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  The very first song, yeah.

• 1:14:17Rick Rubin?

  By Kiss?

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  Yep, Nothing to Lose.

• 1:14:19Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  And the ad was me spitting fire, full-page Rolling Stone ad and all that stuff, because no other band ever was doing that. So they led with, you know, the guy who sticks his tongue out and all this kind of stuff. And they went with Nothing to Lose. When I first heard Backdoor Man, I didn't know what that meant. I had no idea. I thought, you know, he's gonna sneak in through the back door. I had no idea it was about The Gateway to Hell. I didn't know. See what I did there?

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  And that record was done in two and a half weeks in New York. And I remember being at my then-girlfriend's house in New Jersey. She had a little basement to herself. She was living at home as well. And her parents, wonderful people, in Hasbrook Heights. And I would, you know, go visit her there and she'd lock the door.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  You know, we were doing boyfriend-girlfriend kind of stuff there. And with music fairly loudly, so you wouldn't hear the shenanigans, the sound.

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  And I was a Slade fan and I like, you know, just English music. And when a song came on, Alison Steele was The Nightbird, W-N-E-W. And I heard.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  And, you know, my heat is broken, I'm so tired. And I thought it was Slade. I go, wait a minute, that's me singing?

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  That's Ace's song, Cold Gin? And all of a sudden, I stopped paying attention, quotation marks, attention, with my girlfriend at the time. I just stood up and I was, I don't know if there's another phrase for that sense of wonder, that ethereal thing when another dimension.

• 1:16:24Speaker 00

  Comes into your reality. Maybe they call it an epiphany, a kind of a like dreaming come true stuff because I never imagined my voice, well, I did.

• 1:16:37Rick Rubin?

  You hear yours, but you hear yourself singing on the radio for the first time.

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  On my favorite thing with Alison Steele saying, okay, here they are. See what's going on, you know, this stuff. And Cole Gin comes on and I thought it was Slade. I thought it was like an English band. And she sits up and go, what, what, what happened? That's, that's our band, that's Kiss. She goes, Kiss? She barely knew about it. We barely, we were nobody. And that first record got us opening slots for Manfred Manservoy Brown.

• 1:17:13Rick Rubin?

  Well.

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  And we kept getting kicked off tours. Because we would have a levitating drum set.

• 1:17:22Rick Rubin?

  It was hard to follow.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  They died. And our Kiss logo, nobody had logos that were hung up stage. Our logo lit up so it would blind you. And between the changes of the band, half hour, they didn't have enough time to bring it. So whoever came on, Argent and on stage, the Kiss logo was still on there because they didn't have enough time to take it down. Not only that, but after a song would be over by anybody, it would go to black. But imprinted in your eyes, it would say Kiss somehow on your retina. You know, that thing.

• 1:18:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, because it's so bright.

• 1:18:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:18:02Rick Rubin?

  Even when the lights go off, it still burned it.

• 1:18:04Speaker 00

  Yes, you couldn't create a more perfect thing. And in fact, uh.

• 1:18:09Rick Rubin?

  You had the sign right from the beginning?

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  Right from the beginning, yeah, the levitating drum set, which was just guys in the back.

• 1:18:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  You know, with the crank, spitting fire, throwing explosives above the heads of the crowds and just anything we could, spitting blood, all that stuff. In fact, New Year's Eve. A month and a half before the first record comes out, 1973, 74, we're fourth on the bill. And within three songs, my hair catches fire. Because stupidly, I sprayed. I didn't notice that on the spray can it says, Gene, you fucking idiot, don't spray your hair like that, because this is flammable. It said, Gene, you fucking, it's right there on the can.

• 1:18:59Rick Rubin?

  That's the only time it ever happened?

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  Oh, no, six or seven times.

• 1:19:02Rick Rubin?

  No, really?

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, as I switched to lighter fluid, which caught like that, that didn't last long. But we had guys with fire extinguishers and wet towels and all that.

• 1:19:13Rick Rubin?

  Any other technical difficulties that happened over the years you could think of?

• 1:19:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. People just think, okay, put something in your mouth and you spit it out, but in those days, everything was dangerous and fire marshals had no idea because they never heard of anybody doing that. And especially not bands, and so what happens is you have a flame source of sword or a torch or something. In my case, it was like a sword. And on the hilt of it were these wrapped material that was soaked in kerosene or gasoline or anything that was flammable.

• 1:19:53Rick Rubin?

  A torch.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you would light it. And my mouth was filled with kerosene. Nobody would see it. I'd walk out on stage with a mouth full of kerosene and then spit the fire and bring the torch close to my mouth and spit it. And while I'm spitting, you have to move the torch away. And before I run out of steam, I've got to move the torch away from the line of my mouth because that fire is very quickly eating its way.

• 1:20:22Rick Rubin?

  Moving towards your mouth.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  Yes, and the, and the actual fire source.

• 1:20:25Rick Rubin?

  Like a fuse.

• 1:20:27Speaker 00

  Bigger fireballs coming at you, five feet or or more.

• 1:20:34Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so in the early days, the fire source would go, ah, as much as 10 feet away, real flammable stuff. Later on, I started to use more safe, but not as flammable stuff, odorless. Lamp oil, because I didn't know that the fumes of kerosene would actually give you cancer. I didn't know what he said anything.

• 1:20:58Rick Rubin?

  Really toxic.

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  So we were major fans of Melody Maker and the other English things. And we'd go down to Eighth Street, right across the street from Electric Lady Studios, to buy the first copies that would come in anywhere in North America. They would be right there on Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. And a few days after we played the concert, and I caught fire and everything, and one side was shorter than the other. There I was, my ugly face on the cover of Melody Maker.

• 1:21:31Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  And then we, we somehow intrinsically knew it without being able to verbalize it. And the idea is actually, it was true then and it's true now. And that is, the rock stars, the stage personas that we all admire, actually have to impact the audio and the visual. Otherwise, it's great songs like "Torn between two lovers." Oh, that's a great song. Who wrote, I don't know who sang it or anything, but it's just a good song. So the song becomes the thing.

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  But you can't sing Satisfaction or play it without knowing it's the Stones. Something about the imagery or the style or something, yeah. And we intrinsically knew that because, I mean, certainly there was Alice, who was around, I don't know, two, three years before us. But we weren't trying to do that. It was not referring to us in the third person. We are that. In fact, which had never been done before during her since, people are so fascinated by the makeup. And initially, they only knew us in the makeup on the album covers and so on. And I think it was Bill O'Coin who actually said, "We're gonna trademark your faces."

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  And we didn't know what trademark meant with the Library of Congress. And we were one of the few people who were able to trademark our faces.

• 1:23:08Rick Rubin?

  Because they're like characters, they're cartoon characters essentially.

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  Bigger because...

• 1:23:16Speaker 00

  You could be Johnny Carson, or Elvis Presley, or whoever, and you could make Halloween masks of those faces. You'd say, "Oh, that's Elvis Presley." You couldn't do a thing about it. But if you used our makeup

• 1:23:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Speaker 00

  on anything

• 1:23:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  on Scooby Doo and everything, and we did that too, we could sue you and take your firstborn.

• 1:23:37Speaker 00

  So immediately, it started to have an impact on fans, who, before we had Makeup Kids, because we've done everything from Kiss condoms to Kiss caskets. We'll get you coming and we'll get you going. I told you that before. Thousands and thousands. Before we knew that, it started to happen naturally.

• 1:23:56Rick Rubin?

  Right from the beginning, you started doing merch?

• 1:23:58Speaker 00

  From the beginning.

• 1:23:59Rick Rubin?

  All different kinds?

• 1:24:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. As soon as the kids, we'll call them the kids, but they came in all ages, would show photos like it. "I'm gonna go see this band." Well, they'd wanna dress up like the thing. And they'd make homemade T-shirts and all that. Because it's a chance for somebody,

• 1:24:23Speaker 00

  the rites of passage, your self-esteem isn't yet well-developed enough. "I could cover my face." And like Halloween, you know, you can dress up and pretend and be outrageous and get more attention. You could do that, but with Argent, you like the song. "Hold your head up." But, you know-

• 1:24:46Rick Rubin?

  You don't know what he looks like.

• 1:24:46Speaker 00

  You have no idea who's in the band and didn't care.

• 1:24:49Rick Rubin?

  Was Kiss the first band to have personalized guitar picks?

• 1:24:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:24:53Rick Rubin?

  Because now everyone has them.

• 1:24:55Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:24:56Rick Rubin?

  But that was a Kiss thing first.

• 1:24:58Speaker 00

  Yes, and we had, like the Mickey Mouse Club, we had-

• 1:25:02Rick Rubin?

  Fan Club. Kiss Army.

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

  That's correct. And we had- In the albums, we would have envelopes, full color and everything. Where in those days, you put five dollar bills or checks or ten dollar bills, round numbers. And there were color ten items on the inner flap or whatever that you could check what you wanted. And you would send away to before people.

• 1:25:30Rick Rubin?

  T-shirts, hats.

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  Necklaces, everything. And we had four warehouses in the San Fernando Valley, working 24 hours a day. Billions of dollars. We were already playing. Atlanta Stadium and, you know, Anaheim Stadium and stuff. We didn't think twice about it. It was just like, oh. And by the way, at that time, we were on eighty-five dollars a week salary. Yeah, I didn't have a car. I didn't care.

• 1:25:59Rick Rubin?

  This happens how many albums in?

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  Uh, three. The first three records didn't sell at all. But the ground swell, the cultural ground swell, Circus Magazine, Roxine, Graves, all that stuff. We were always on the cover.

• 1:26:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:26:18Rick Rubin?

  And the concerts always did well.

• 1:26:20Speaker 00

  Sold out in, yeah, multiple days, anywhere. Cause we went everywhere. We went to Ypsilanti, Michigan and.

• 1:26:28Rick Rubin?

  Did you ever go to Europe?

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, the very first European shows with, with the Hammersmith Odeon, which sold out. We did a European tour in nineteen seventy-five. When we went to Japan in seventy-seven for the first time, we broke the Beatles record and played four or five days at the Budokan, which was and continues to be the large arena. Before bands played stadiums there. When we went to Australia the first time, we played two days per stadium down there.

• 1:27:04Speaker 00

  One in every fourteen Australians bought tickets or albums. I know, it was insane. We were trapped on the top floors of our Siebel townhouse because they tried to take photos of us without our makeup. Nobody ever done that. We were always protected, our sort of Clark Kent Superman thing.

• 1:27:25Rick Rubin?

  And that was an idea?

• 1:27:26Speaker 00

  From day one.

• 1:27:28Rick Rubin?

  We're gonna never be seen without the makeup.

• 1:27:31Speaker 00

  It was Bill O'Coin who said, "You've never seen Marilyn Monroe in a potato sack outfit without her makeup. That's why you have such a vivid... It was never like, oh, this is me without makeup. Nope. It ruins the thing. And you didn't know that under Superman, it was this kind of ordinary Clark Kent kind of guy. So I'll never forget this. The first night, we're playing two days at Sydney Football Stadium. And then two days at the Melbourne Football Stadium. Till that time, nobody did that, not the Beatles, not there. And first night, we're staying there, we have jet lag and everything.

• 1:28:15Speaker 00

  The shows are coming up in a day or two. And we have the curtains drawn. And the sun is going down. And I hear a loud motor, like a plane or a helicopter, coming about to crash into the top floor, which we had. So I part the curtain a little bit, and right outside my window is a helicopter with a TV crew trained on the windows, trying to get photos of the band. Yeah. And the only way we could have some privacy is we take out these huge boats into the harbor and fill it with food and chicks and all that stuff away from it. And of course, here in the middle of the harbor, and smaller boats are circling the things.

• 1:29:00Rick Rubin?

  You basically experienced Beatlemania. That's what it was.

• 1:29:04Speaker 00

  I couldn't imagine, you know, when the Beatles played at Shea Stadium, they were on for 20 minutes.

• 1:29:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  And the sound system...

• 1:29:13Rick Rubin?

  Couldn't hear them.

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  All you could hear was just the screaming.

• 1:29:21Rick Rubin?

  Let's hear a song from the second album.

• 1:29:35Rick Rubin?

  Chuck Berry.

• 1:29:36Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  This is from that first show at the Hotel Diplomat.

• 1:30:00Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:30:50Rick Rubin?

  Insane.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:30:52Rick Rubin?

  Insane.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  Far as I can see.

• 1:30:57Rick Rubin?

  Well. Remember anything about this cover? Second album.

• 1:31:02Speaker 00

  Yes. I basically wrote "Let Me Go Rock and Roll" by myself, but Paul, I think, threw in some stuff. And we just looked back on Lennon, McCartney, said, "Okay, stick both names on." So, second record, we were constantly on tour. In those years, we did two albums a year and write the songs and tour.

• 1:31:24Rick Rubin?

  How many shows would you do in a year typically?

• 1:31:26Speaker 00

  Two hundred plus.

• 1:31:28Rick Rubin?

  Two hundred plus, plus two albums.

• 1:31:32Speaker 00

  Travel, rehearse, do all that.

• 1:31:34Rick Rubin?

  Write everything.

• 1:31:35Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 1:31:36Rick Rubin?

  Would you be writing on the road all the time?

• 1:31:38Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 1:31:39Rick Rubin?

  Because you're on the road all the time.

• 1:31:40Speaker 00

  Doing demos. We had a day off. You go in and you do a demo. There was no time. And the records were done in two weeks. But the astonishing thing is, it doesn't matter how unique and how...

• 1:31:53Speaker 00

  Well, you do stuff. We're like ants next to the Beatles. Lennon and McCartney, I keep going back to that. I know I can't shine their shoes. They'd write two or three songs and they'd come in the next day and teach the guys in the studio and record all two or three songs, finished, done, mixed in one day. And Led Zeppelin I was recorded in 18 hours from beginning to end. How do you do that?

• 1:32:21Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable, unbelievable. So a second album cover, what do you remember?

• 1:32:26Speaker 00

  Oh, the cover is Norman Seif. Norman Seif was a brain surgeon out of South Africa. And he spoke, you know, that kind of Afrikaans accent and came to LA for, you know, all the good times and the stuff. And he had a movie film studio. And he would, in the early days of videos and things, he would just take photos all the time, very artistic guy. And that's totally his creation of, he was a big fan of Japanese pop art culture. And he was the one that did that. In fact, put our names in Japanese on the covers,

• 1:33:09Speaker 00

  so much so that that record immediately made us a big deal in Japan and in Asia because they thought we were Japanese.

• 1:33:20Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:33:22Speaker 00

  They thought we were Japanese and were shocked because they never saw us without makeup.

• 1:33:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Speaker 00

  And that's in modern, you know, there are different versions of English. You say thee and thou and all that, you think, oh, that's not real. No, it was like conversational Japanese. And during the photo sessions to get the back cover, I remember, and Paul is not a drinker, never has been. The other two guys, not so much, they indulged. And that night during the photo session, we had like Satyricon, you know, Fellini. Everybody in costumes, horse heads and girls with no tops and just. Crazy stuff. Do you know what I mean by Fellini?

• 1:34:05Rick Rubin?

  Yes, of course.

• 1:34:07Speaker 00

  And Paul had too much to drink, so much so that he was killing over. We had to prop him up when we were taking the photos because we were trying to do that. And I remember, we didn't have limos or anything. We had a station wagon and Bill O'Coin and I picked up Paul like a sack of potatoes and took him into the station wagon, put the seats down in the back and put him in the back and locked the car so he wouldn't get in trouble.

• 1:34:33Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:34:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, by the way, Ace Frayley started to indulge in his interest in things that went up his nose and other things. And this was the first time any of us had been in L.A. So Ace met the wrong people. Somehow he was, he would attract or they would attract him. And he was, you know, a rebel in that sort of whatever. There's a red light, he'd go through at full speed. It just seems to be in the DNA. And he would never, from all my time with him, never drink socially. Just excess everything.

• 1:35:14Speaker 00

  Peter as well would take certain prolectivities. At any rate, Ace, through his own stories and in one of his own books, said that he rented his first car because he never owned a car. We were on tour. We didn't know, this was like the end of seventy-four.

• 1:35:36Rick Rubin?

  And you're also coming from New York and in New York, a lot of people don't own cars. It's not really a car culture.

• 1:35:40Speaker 00

  You just walk on the street or you hop a cab or go to Subway.

• 1:35:43Rick Rubin?

  Exactly.

• 1:35:44Speaker 00

  And everything's, you know, half hour away. There's no traffic jams or anything. And Ace rented his first car and decided, I'm guessing he had something in his system, to go up to Mulholland.

• 1:36:02Speaker 00

  And I don't know if it was Coldwater Canyon or Laurel Canyon. He decided in the middle of the night, before we did the photo session tomorrow, to go down and take those two as fast as he could.

• 1:36:16Speaker 00

  From his own admission, and of course crashed into something, and crashed his face, half of his face into the wheel of the car. So he was all bloodied and black and blue and everything. Next day, the show must go on, we have to do it. So what we did, and we have photos, he put on makeup only on half of his face. And then before Photoshop,

• 1:36:43Speaker 00

  they took a photo of the left side of his face and just duplicated it on the right side.

• 1:36:48Rick Rubin?

  Like a mirror.

• 1:36:50Speaker 00

  Like a mirror. It still looks a little strange because everybody's face is a little bit different on one side than the other. Yeah, that was one of the things. And I remember at the end of the photo session, for the back cover and front cover, must have been 1:00 in the morning. We were staying at the Ramada Inn across the street from Casablanca Records.

• 1:37:12Speaker 00

  And I remember coming in, there was a swimming pool, and in full dragon boots and diving into the pool, must have looked like some ethereal monster or something because I had the bat wings and the black and all that, just swimming there. And we pretty much stayed awake that night. We had a second and third floor, it was only a three-floor thing. And then there were girls going from one room to the other.

• 1:37:39Speaker 00

  The good times before AIDS,

• 1:37:43Speaker 00

  and when girls took birth control,

• 1:37:48Speaker 00

  and had a different mindset, before feminism became a tool, and I fully support it.

• 1:37:56Speaker 00

  Everybody just loved life. It was just a much happier place, time.

• 1:38:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Speaker 00

  I don't remember divisions. I mean, there was the hippie stuff in the 60s because of Vietnam War. But other than that, it was like everybody was, how do I put it? Everybody was happy getting laid and not worrying about anything, just enjoying life.

• 1:38:20Rick Rubin?

  So the last song we listened to was?

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  Let Me Go Rock and Roll.

• 1:38:24Rick Rubin?

  Let Me Go Rock and Roll from the second album, which is Hotter Than Hell. Both of those first two albums came out in 74.

• 1:38:31Speaker 00

  Within six months of each other.

• 1:38:35Rick Rubin?

  Amazing. And then next is the third album, which is Dressed to Kill.

• 1:38:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Rick Rubin?

  And let's hear a song from that.

• 1:39:54Speaker 00

  So I had a song, conceptually like Stephen King's Christine,

• 1:40:58Speaker 00

  which was a song about a car.

• 1:41:06Speaker 00

  And it was called "You Drive Me Wild and I'll Drive You Crazy." He goes...

• 1:41:29Speaker 00

  You know, just straight ahead, kind of Chuck Berry-esque kind of thing.

• 1:41:32Rick Rubin?

  And this is even predating Kiss, this song?

• 1:41:37Rick Rubin?

  That part of it?

• 1:41:37Speaker 00

  Uh, no, that was once Kiss started, I was constantly writing.

• 1:41:41Rick Rubin?

  Always writing.

• 1:41:42Speaker 00

  We'd bring, yeah. And Paul likewise had, was always writing and it came, when you didn't think about it, it came easy.

• 1:41:50Rick Rubin?

  Would you have a guitar in the hotel rooms on board?

• 1:41:52Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 1:41:53Rick Rubin?

  Always?

• 1:41:53Speaker 00

  On the bus and you'd bring a little tape recorder. And you'd, you know, just ideas. And then Neil Bogart, the head of the label, said, "I'm gonna produce your third album."

• 1:42:10Speaker 00

  We didn't have a title. Then we did the photo session right on, I think 14th Street and 5th Avenue with Bob Gruen, who became a London photographer and all that.

• 1:42:22Speaker 00

  And we were walking. Somebody came up with the idea, "Let's put on suits and ties

• 1:42:28Speaker 00

  and be on the streets and see how people react." You know, make it kind of like Strange Days. Well, it's New York and they've seen it, been there, done that. Nobody looked twice at us. They just walked right by us. Just kind of like, "Oh, I gotta get up. I feel like taking a shit." They're just walking. In fact, I didn't have a suit and tie and all that. So I wore bill of coins. In those days, I was pretty thin. So I wore bill of coins suit and tie, which barely fit me. I was much taller than him. And so you see the pants, they're halfway up the leg. And clogs, because I didn't have regular shoes. And clogs, I think, belonged to Ace Frayley.

• 1:43:13Speaker 00

  So there I am with socks, clogs, and short pants, like they shrank in water.

• 1:43:20Speaker 00

  And then, when we saw the photo, somebody came up with, "Oh, right. The name of the record is Just to Kill." So Neil Bogart, who was a record man and knew a hit when he heard it, was pretty tone deaf. Didn't play an instrument, couldn't tell you what was it. But he was experienced enough to see that when he would go to Kiss concerts, they were out of their minds. They looked like us. It was almost like an African or Indian tribal gathering, because their faces would, like, war paint kind of thing. And they would all be bobbing, you know, like a cult. Mouting all the words and moving together. When we'd move on stage, that way the whole audience,

• 1:44:05Speaker 00

  we'd be doing that, you know, really nuts. Unlike other bands. Of course, you have the Swifties and the Dead audience, and a lot of bands have their own thing. But our thing was very cult-like, a gathering of the tribes. And he said worse to the effect of, "You guys..."

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  May not understand it, but I've been in the audiences, and they're nuts for you. And you have everything going for yourself. We don't have hit songs or anything. You need to write, I remember, like it was yesterday, you need to write an anthem. And both Paul and I looked at each other and said, like, what's an anthem? You sort of know the word. What do you mean? He goes, well, a song that says something about who and what you are, what you believe in. And when you take a look at how that applies to certain bands, especially Queen, "We will, we will rock you, we are the champions",

• 1:45:12Speaker 00

  something about being aware of the fans and you, like a football thing. Yeah, like a football thing. That's an anthem. And we didn't know anything. So Paul and I are trying to figure out how to do that. So I played him, "You drive me wild, I'll drive you crazy", that kind of a thing. And he goes, "I kind of like that", and then he went off and came back with...

• 1:45:47Speaker 00

  I had that?

• 1:45:54Speaker 00

  And he said, "Well, maybe put in a transitional thing",

• 1:46:04Speaker 00

  we'll figure out the words later, and then lift it with... We got a big, and he came up with... "I wanna rock and roll all night, and party every day". Now, if you write songs and you're aware of bars, only musicians know about this, you go, "One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, one, two, three". So the last chord is a five bar instead of a four bar, because the words go too long. "Rock and roll all night". And party every day.

• 1:46:45Speaker 00

  Ah, that comes in, if you know about bars, comes in wrong. But if you tap your foot, you're not aware of it. So it's a four bar chorus, except for the last chord, which is five.

• 1:46:59Rick Rubin?

  And something about that seems to make it even catchier for some reason.

• 1:47:03Speaker 00

  Yes, it is a little tension at the end.

• 1:47:04Rick Rubin?

  I don't know why that is, but it definitely gives you the feeling of it's more memorable.

• 1:47:11Speaker 00

  And party every day. Ah, it is that pause. And in retrospect, it was always about the fans.

• 1:47:21Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 1:47:22Speaker 00

  And then when you meet Mike McCready and the Metallica guys, or Lenny Kravitz, who was kicked out of school because he came in looking like me one day, Trent Reznor. I mean, it just goes down like Lawrence Fishburne, all kinds of people to whom the band meant more than songs. And therein lies the crux of a lot of the appeal and why we were able to do thousands and thousands of licensed products with our faces, where I'm madly in love with Aerosmith

• 1:48:04Speaker 00

  and, you know, all kinds of amazing bands. What you get is Stephen and the music. What you get with us is Disneyland with a backbeat.

• 1:48:17Rick Rubin?

  I can remember listening to I Want to Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day. I can remember, I was in the gymnasium of my junior high school, and I remember listening to it over and over again. I want to say trying to understand it. I don't mean understand the words, and I don't mean understand the music, but understand what was happening. Why do I want to listen to this over and over again?

• 1:48:43Speaker 00

  This is really interesting to me. Keep going, keep going.

• 1:48:46Rick Rubin?

  What's happening here? And I remember that experience of listening to it over and over. And it didn't relate to my life in any way, but something about the combination of the music and the sentiment of the words.

• 1:49:05Rick Rubin?

  Moved me at, I don't know, thirteen or fourteen years or however old I was at the time, but I remember listening to it over and over and over again and just feeling like it made me want to know more.

• 1:49:19Speaker 00

  It is a very strange thing, this music that encompasses blues, rock, country, you know, all this stuff by people who maybe taught themselves their instruments and weren't classically trained and can't read or write music. But it really is kind of modern folk music, like reflecting the times, the culture, the feelings and all that stuff with lyrics, lyrics, even if it's. I said na na na na na, something about. Something about the lyrics and the sound of the words is cultural.

• 1:50:02Speaker 00

  Zappa, who I wrote a song with, may have said it best, talking about music is like dancing to architecture.

• 1:50:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:12Speaker 00

  It's just a feeling, it just comes over you and it either gets you, when I hear Baby Workout by Jackie Wilson, I'm, I'm in it, I feel it, and when I hear classical music, I listen to it.

• 1:50:27Rick Rubin?

  When was the first live album, Kiss Alive?

• 1:50:31Speaker 00

  The New Year's Eve, nineteen seventy-five, nineteen seventy-six, two albums a year. We were on tour, we didn't have enough time to go in a studio to do another one.

• 1:50:42Rick Rubin?

  This is after what we just listened to is the third album, so Alive came out after the third album?

• 1:50:48Speaker 00

  Within six months.

• 1:50:49Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:50:50Speaker 00

  And it was a double album and we were.

• 1:50:53Rick Rubin?

  With a band who only has three albums.

• 1:50:56Speaker 00

  And in those days, if you put out a live album, it's like if you played Las Vegas, your career was over, had Wade Newton and people like that. Only when your career was over, the Skyliners and the Flamingos, you'd put out a live record because you didn't have new material. It was unheard of for a band starting out to put out a live record. So we decided. Again, delusionally, not having any resume or experience. We decided to put out a double album with a souvenir. Like, you went to Disneyland, you got photos, and not a lot of words, but a lot of photos of what the live experience was like, and write personal notes to the fans from each of us.

• 1:51:41Speaker 00

  And in the records, we kept doing that, putting in, like, in Cracker Jack's box, you'd get the peanuts and the popcorn. And a surprise, I bought the Cracker Jack's boxes for the surprise thing, not for the peanuts and the popcorn. And wash off tattoos, and Love Gun would be a bang-bang, you know, thing that you can go like that, and it would make a bang note. And of course, a thing you filled out. Where do you live? What magazines do you buy? All this stuff, which sounds like marketing, of course it is, but it told the fans. We got closer to the fans. Who are you? Where do you live?

• 1:52:18Rick Rubin?

  We want to know about you, too.

• 1:52:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you know, who are you kind of stuff. And that connected the Kiss Army and stuff. And the Kiss Army started in Terre Haute, Indiana, where a guy named Sharkey calls a local radio station and says WKRX. Might be, it might be WKRX. Could be wrong. Why don't you play Kiss? And the guy goes, I don't know, we don't play, we play Carpenters and, you know, and John Denver. We don't, what is this Kiss? Oh, you got to check him out, it's the best thing to go. He goes, no, I'm afraid we can't do that. So, and he hangs up. And the kid calls back again. Well, listen, if you don't play Kiss by 5 o'clock today, I'm going to have the Kiss Army surround your.

• 1:53:04Speaker 00

  There was a broadcasting station, a little one shack outside of town, so they could have their broadcast wires outside of town. We're going to have the Kiss Army surround you until you surrender and all that. And the disc jockey, it was one, one-man operation, calls the newspaper, and the newspaper says, yeah, whatever. Sure enough, after 5 o'clock, he didn't play it, and God knows how many people surrounded this little shack, and it was on the cover of the Terre Haute newspaper. Kiss Army invades WKR, you know, whatever.

• 1:53:40Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:53:41Speaker 00

  And that's where the Kiss Army, and by the way, after that, they played Kiss. Yeah, and that's where the name came from. It was not a marketing thing. It was created by the fans. If it's a Kiss Army, it's a voluntary army. And it got so crazy that we went to Flint, Michigan, because we kept getting letters from the football coach. And there's going to be a movie about this. I think Dave Grohl is going to be the director so far. That's what I hear.

• 1:54:10Rick Rubin?

  Great, I hope so.

• 1:54:11Speaker 00

  And it's called Cadillac High. Cadillac, Michigan, outside of Detroit. Small town where all the grown men, whatever, had gone to Detroit to work in the auto industry. So there were very few, you know, sort of grown people there. The teenagers were aimless and stuff. And the football team in high school lost every single game they played. And this school teacher with a family, English teacher, comes into town looking for a job. And I'm an English teacher and, you know, can I get a job kind of thing? I got to support my family. The principal says, you know, anything about football? And of course, the guy goes, oh, yeah.

• 1:54:56Speaker 00

  I know a lot about football. He goes, OK, you want to be the coach of the football? We have an opening. That's fine. He didn't know anything about football.

• 1:55:03Rick Rubin?

  Needs a job.

• 1:55:04Speaker 00

  That's just a job. And he goes out in the field, meets the guys, and they're aimless and stuff. They start throwing the ball around. And immediately, they go, let's do Deuce. Then he hears, OK, Black Diamond. He goes, hey, hey, guys, guys, what are you talking about? What is all this thing? Oh, no, they're plays, you know, where one guy goes to the left and I throw it to him. And we know, it's like secret language. It's by our favorite group, Kiss. He goes, Kiss? What's that? And he started to see the photos of the things, like he didn't understand. He didn't know anything about football, didn't know about Kiss. And he said to the guys, "Okay, that's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna put on a blast kiss and our

• 1:55:50Speaker 00

  secret code between ourselves are gonna be their song titles. And this is a matter of history."

• 1:55:56Rick Rubin?

  And so it's a real story?

• 1:55:58Speaker 00

  A real story.

• 1:55:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:59Speaker 00

  And ESPN did a two-hour special, which you can still go. They went undefeated to the state and national championship from day one. And we started hearing about this. And the state senator and the governor and the local officials, all that stuff. You gotta come to Cadillac, Michigan, which we never heard of. And we were playing Flint, Michigan, on the way to So and So. We had a day off. And we went, "Okay, we'll put makeup on and we'll pass them." And I gotta show you two seconds of this. We come into town and the whole town is in Kiss makeup. Mothers, daughters, the streets were Kiss Boulevard.

• 1:56:45Speaker 00

  I don't know how to describe it to you. It was like you landed on a Twilight Zone episode. And it looks like Earth, but not so much.

• 1:56:57Speaker 03

  In the small town of Cadillac, Michigan, population 10,000, Cadillac High School's Friday Night Homecoming game in early October has long been a cherished tradition, as well as the homecoming parade hours earlier.

• 1:57:15Speaker 03

  But it's the parade for the Vikings that went through town in 1975 that has never been forgotten by anyone here. Because it looked like this.

• 1:57:36Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  Jim Neff is the man who brought the rock band Kiss to Cadillac some three decades ago. Back in 1974, he was an assistant coach with a problem. The Cadillac defense was finding itself back on its heels on the field because they were way too tight in the locker room before games.

• 1:58:03Speaker 04

  Back then, it was game face on. Everybody was stern and no one cracked a smile.

• 1:58:09Speaker 05

  It was pretty somber and the kids were, they were really down and they weren't having any fun.

• 1:58:14Speaker 04

  I said, well, let's play, let's play some rock and roll in the locker room. I have the perfect band because their name is Kiss and Kiss stands in football for keep it simple stupid.

• 1:58:24Rick Rubin?

  It's incredible.

• 1:58:25Speaker 00

  Insane.

• 1:58:26Rick Rubin?

  It's incredible.

• 1:58:27Speaker 00

  Now, when you open the middle of a live one.

• 1:58:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:30Speaker 00

  Are two fans holding a Kiss homemade thing.

• 1:58:34Rick Rubin?

  Uh huh. Famous picture, I remember it.

• 1:58:36Speaker 00

  We didn't even have a gold record yet and we met them, I don't know, 10 or 15 years later and I'm proud to say one was a successful real estate agent and the other one's a doctor.

• 1:58:49Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:58:50Speaker 00

  And we later found out that night after we came, they had the single largest amount of pregnancies in their history.

• 1:59:02Rick Rubin?

  So you're, so you're spreading goodwill, you're saying?

• 1:59:06Speaker 00

  Somebody was spreading something, but it wasn't me. And so we wrote rock and roll all night and when that hit, by the way, it was not a hit on radio, it went so and so, we realized that Kiss never spent enough time in the studio. The quality wasn't good. The producers weren't good. It wasn't until Bob Ezrin came in later on that we started to do better.

• 1:59:33Rick Rubin?

  Is that Destroyer, the fourth one?

• 1:59:35Speaker 00

  Yes, where, where the arrangements got better. It was Ezrin who also secretly worked really deeply in The Wall, which he barely got credit for. So we decided to do a live album as a souvenir, as close as you can get to the live event. So throughout the record, the audience was screaming their heads off. That became Kiss Alive. Kiss Alive became the second, within a half hour, platinum record of all time. The very first platinum record was New Year's Eve, 1976, 75, 76, and it was Hotel California.

• 2:00:19Speaker 00

  Hours was a half hour later, a double album, multimillion.

• 2:00:23Rick Rubin?

  And a live album.

• 2:00:25Speaker 00

  It was a live record, too. Now, the platinum record, historically speaking, was invented as a promotion by Capitol Records for Grand Funk Railroad. They were outselling the Stones and everybody else. There were Times Square billboards, you know, for about two years. They played Shea Stadium. Opening was Humble Pot. They were a big band for about two years. And Capitol Records, they gave away not gold records, but platinum records, which was just a promotional. Because records, if you sold a million dollars worth of records, at $3.39 per record, that would be a million dollars.

• 2:01:08Speaker 00

  So about 300,000 albums. But more and more records were selling, 500,000. So gold became 500,000 LPs, long players. But then bands started to sell millions of records. So the RIAA took on platinum records. And the first two were Hotel California, a single record, and Alive One, a double album. And that Alive One begat Rock and Roll All Night Live version, which came out and was top four, top five.

• 2:01:43Rick Rubin?

  So the hit version was not the studio version, but the live version?

• 2:01:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:01:47Rick Rubin?

  That's really interesting. The Frampton song was also one that was the live version.

• 2:01:52Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. And don't kid yourself, Kiss engineered by Eddie Kramer.

• 2:01:59Speaker 00

  Frampton Comes Alive. Alive became the synonymous with, this is a double album. It's not the end of our career, but new and using the alive thing. And Eddie Kramer did that record too. And sure enough, the hit songs, the live record became like, and then everybody, Cheap Trick did live records and everybody. And they didn't wait until the end of their career to do a live album. And I gotta tell you this because strange things happened. Certainly to us and to many bands. We're in the middle of recording one of the shows at the Forum. And during the middle of the show, all of a sudden you see a prosthetic leg.

• 2:02:39Speaker 00

  It was a full leg with a sock on it and one sneaker. And it was being held in the front of the stage above. So we stopped the show. And we looked at each other like, what are we supposed to do? And somebody gave us what was then called a magic marker before Sharpies. And we signed the prosthetic leg, you know, on the pink area. And we kind of held it in the front and somebody took-

• 2:03:08Rick Rubin?

  They passed it back.

• 2:03:09Speaker 00

  I guess somebody took it. You see hands and took it. And I'm assuming the gentleman who sent it up on stage was leaning on somebody because he didn't have the use of two legs. On another occasion, they were passing up a very young, close to being baby, with headsets on, like earphones.

• 2:03:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:32Speaker 00

  What are you gonna do with that? Sign it or barbecue it? I don't know what-

• 2:03:35Rick Rubin?

  They were passing a baby to the stage.

• 2:03:37Speaker 00

  Yes, we did not. We refused it and just said, you know, kind of, no. And, but clearly-

• 2:03:44Rick Rubin?

  Do you think they were donating the baby to you guys?

• 2:03:47Speaker 00

  I hope, no, I don't think so. I think it was just, please sign my baby, I guess.

• 2:03:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. Next, we have the fourth album. I'll play a song first, Destroyer. I might skip the intro because it's really long. And it's not music.

• 2:05:47Speaker 00

  Can you hear the car? Yeah.

• 2:06:06Speaker 00

  Great song. Paul wrote that one about a live experience, about a fan who wants to see Kiss in Detroit, Rock City, and dies before he gets there. Moving fast, doing nine to five. Now, right after that section, there is a solo. Do you mind playing the solo very quickly?

• 2:06:34Speaker 00

  Doing fast ninety-five.

• 2:06:44Speaker 00

  I feel so good, I'm so alive.

• 2:06:47Speaker 00

  Here's my song.

• 2:07:00Speaker 00

  Now, there's no band, just by itself.

• 2:07:42Speaker 00

  12 o'clock, I gotta rock.

• 2:07:47Speaker 00

  Truck ahead, blood staring at my eyes.

• 2:08:23Speaker 00

  And it goes on to "Kingdom of the Nighttime World" and other anthems.

• 2:08:26Rick Rubin?

  Which is a great, great song.

• 2:08:28Speaker 00

  That solo.

• 2:08:32Speaker 00

  Bob Ezrin comes in and says, "Okay, there's songs like that, songs like that." "Okay, here's the solo." And he goes...

• 2:08:42Speaker 00

  "You guys aren't gonna play, it's just gonna be that melody and drums." "And then it's gonna be in harmony." Which bands didn't do that, you know, later Iron Maiden. And the boys are back in town, you'd hear that harmony thing. There's just no harmonies and solos, what the hell is that?

• 2:08:57Rick Rubin?

  It also sounds almost like classical music.

• 2:08:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not blues.

• 2:09:01Rick Rubin?

  Spanish classical music.

• 2:09:02Speaker 00

  That's right, that's right. And that's all Ezrin. I never think of the It's not blues.

• 2:09:14Speaker 00

  That's blues, flat third and all that. That's all him. Also, the bass part.

• 2:09:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:22Speaker 00

  Which reminded me of, I can't play that bass part, that's

• 2:09:30Speaker 00

  It sounds like the Percy Mayfield, yeah.

• 2:09:32Rick Rubin?

  It also reminds me of John Entwistle.

• 2:09:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:09:36Rick Rubin?

  But it's in the solo of the Who song. Is it My Generation?

• 2:09:42Speaker 00

  Yes, it is. In the middle, he does.

• 2:09:45Rick Rubin?

  It has a

• 2:09:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's a real producer.

• 2:09:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:50Speaker 00

  Who, and by the way, originally, Paul had Detroit Rock City and that was his ideas.

• 2:10:10Speaker 00

  But without the

• 2:10:16Speaker 00

  So it was all like, and it was Ezrin who said like a

• 2:10:28Speaker 00

  It was that, you know, he gave it room, yeah. It became, I don't know, bigger, almost more symphonic. And then he, Bob Ezrin, said, the song is about a fan who dies.

• 2:10:42Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 2:10:43Speaker 00

  At the end, so let's put in a car, he's starting up the car in the beginning and at the end, it crashes and goes right into

• 2:11:01Rick Rubin?

  The real one-two punch.

• 2:11:21Speaker 02

  One guitar.

• 2:11:34Speaker 00

  I'm the king of the nighttime world.

• 2:11:41Rick Rubin?

  What a song.

• 2:12:08Rick Rubin?

  Amazing. What a song.

• 2:12:10Speaker 00

  But all the songs had a... About the culture of the band and the fans. The first song's about a fan on way to Detroit to see his favorite band. His music, his favorite songs play, and he dies. Second one is about the feeling of it. "I feel like the king and you're my headlight queen." And then we release "Detroit Rock City" as the first single. In those days, there were B-sides. You'd get the single, the A-side, which you wanted radio to play, and you'd give the fans another song on the B-side. Well, the B-side was a song we never imagined anybody would hear because it didn't sound like Kiss. But it's not a wimpy ballad.

• 2:12:54Speaker 00

  "Beth, I hear you calling, but I can't come home right now." You know why? Because me and the boys are playing all night. What's more important, your band or me? Actually, the band is more important. Yeah, because they'll pay my rent. You're just gonna soak up the... yeah. And it was a very unromantic things which made it rock. But the sound was like a ballad. So one of the very few times, didn't happen often, where radio turned the song over and started playing. And Beth became a hit. Massive. It won the People's Choice Awards and all this stuff. Let's hear a little bit of Beth.

• 2:15:02Speaker 00

  Ezrin heard the song. This middle section is mulchard. It's in public doing.

• 2:15:13Speaker 00

  It's mulchard. And he integrated that in the middle.

• 2:15:19Speaker 00

  And that's an outside musician.

• 2:15:25Speaker 00

  Dick Wagner playing guitar on a few songs because Ace by that time had given into his weaknesses and wouldn't show up in the studio. And I love Ace and I love Peter and it was just so sad that it happened to them. The fans hated me for, it's like your mom telling the kids that your fathers are drunk and a loser. Kids don't want to hear that, but it's the truth.

• 2:15:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:53Speaker 00

  And all these decisions are just hurting himself, nobody else. You know, everybody thinks you can't get along without me.

• 2:16:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:05Speaker 00

  Actually, spare tires are just as good as the real tires and the car moves along just fine.

• 2:16:11Rick Rubin?

  How was the Destroyer album received?

• 2:16:15Speaker 00

  It stopped at 890,000 albums. And then when Beth kicked in, nothing anybody expected, it became multi-platinum and sold by the millions like right away.

• 2:16:29Rick Rubin?

  And that's the first album cover that's actually cartoon, is that correct?

• 2:16:33Speaker 00

  Yes, it was, I'm afraid it's my idea, I said, you know, we're...

• 2:16:37Rick Rubin?

  I'm not against it.

• 2:16:38Speaker 00

  I'm just saying to people who are musos, what they call it, where are the guitar and the drums? No, no, we're bigger than our instruments, we're like Marvel superheroes.

• 2:16:49Rick Rubin?

  That's what it looks like.

• 2:16:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16:51Rick Rubin?

  That's what it looks like.

• 2:16:52Speaker 00

  And so, all the poses are directly from Jack Kirby, who created Fantastic Four and the Hulk.

• 2:17:00Rick Rubin?

  It looks like the Fantastic Four, except just his kiss.

• 2:17:02Speaker 00

  Yes. And the idea being is, how do you separate yourself from people that define themselves by their instruments? It bears noting that perhaps the most musical out of all of them, The Beatles, were never on their covers with their instruments, ever. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, it was just a suitcase and they're around it. It's because they're bigger than the instruments they play.

• 2:17:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. The next album was...

• 2:17:36Rick Rubin?

  If we're counting, there have been four studio albums.

• 2:17:41Speaker 00

  Three studio, one live.

• 2:17:42Rick Rubin?

  Three studio, one live. And now we're up to the fifth studio.

• 2:18:37Rick Rubin?

  Great Beatles-esque harmonies.

• 2:19:14Rick Rubin?

  Great song, and maybe my favorite Kiss album cover.

• 2:19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, that became iconic.

• 2:19:21Speaker 00

  That's Paul on lead guitar. Paul could also play, you know, in his range. Just want to say something that we started to discover.

• 2:19:31Speaker 00

  Not just who and what we are, but what we meant to the fans. So the word, the demon, the star child, the spaceman, the catman, those were created by the fans. They started to refer to us as that.

• 2:19:44Rick Rubin?

  So they never had names before that?

• 2:19:46Speaker 00

  Now we were just Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and so on. And the fans took it. We start to have Kiss comic books, Marvel comics, the biggest selling Marvel comics of all time. At a buck fifty instead of twenty-five cents. And it was my idea to make a bigger size so that we'd be racked next to Time Magazine because the smaller comic books were in a different rack. And not everybody read comic books. At any rate, we started writing songs about ourselves. We started making fun of each other. I said, Paul, you always write silly love girl songs like Christine Sixteen. I made it up on the spot. He goes, oh, that's a good title.

• 2:20:30Speaker 00

  Christine Sixteen, that's a good title. So as soon as he heard that, he was gonna go and write a song. So, oh, I better go and write one. So I wrote Christine Sixteen fast and had the Van Halen brothers come in and, you know, do the demo. And then Paul said to me, yeah, well, you ever write a monster song? You know, I'm the god of thunder and all this stuff. Oh, what did you say? That's cool.

• 2:20:53Rick Rubin?

  God of thunder.

• 2:20:54Speaker 00

  I'm the god of, I'm gonna go write. No, but he finished it first. Paul wrote God of Thunder, A Modern Day Man of Steel, and I Command You to Kneel kind of thing. And it was Bob Ezrin.

• 2:21:05Rick Rubin?

  But you wrote it making fun of your character.

• 2:21:07Speaker 00

  Making fun. And I wrote Christine Sixteen, making fun of Paul. Yeah.

• 2:21:11Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 2:21:12Speaker 00

  And, I mean, you could say there's anything of a Lennon McCartney. Lennon was like, oh, you ever write a love song like silly? And McCartney later on said, what's wrong with silly love songs? So when we were doing Destroyer, and Ace didn't always show up, unfortunately, and it was time to record God of Thunder, it was Bob Ezrin who turned to Paul and said, Gene's gonna sing this one, not you, because you're not the god of thunder. Gene is. It really hurt Paul. But then when we heard the track back, that became a, an iconic kind of a thing because it was a song about...

• 2:21:53Speaker 00

  The band, Me, just like "The Boys Are Back in Town" by Thin La-Z-zy is kind of like the feeling of, "Hey, we're back in town, we're gonna raise some hell." And "We Are the Champions" feels like, hey, they're singing about like a football, it's about us.

• 2:22:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:11Speaker 00

  And "We Will, We Will Rock You," it's a very anthemic.

• 2:22:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:15Speaker 00

  And so I started writing more songs like that, like "They Call Me Doctor Love," like that. And I remember going back to Crazy World of Arthur Brown. When I first heard that song, I went, "What?" And it starts off with, "I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you," and the name of the song is "Fire." By the way, you could have had "Fire," "Ben, you, and you," and all that song. But he, at the beginning, says, "I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you fire." As a teenager, I went, "What the hell?" Because people didn't sing about themselves.

• 2:22:51Rick Rubin?

  Let's listen to "Calling Doctor Love," same album.

• 2:22:55Speaker 00

  I remember writing "Calling Doctor Love"

• 2:22:59Speaker 00

  at the Indianapolis Holiday Inn. Middle of the night, I saw a Three Stooges cartoon. It was the Three Stooges as idiot doctors. And they're running back and forth from different rooms, and the view is down the hallway, "Calling Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, calling Doctor..." And they're going from one room to another. And I'm going, "Calling Doctor Love, calling Doctor Love." And then it just rhymed, because I've got the cure you're thinking of. And the song wrote itself like that, inspired by the Three Stooges.

• 2:24:58Speaker 00

  Kind of a silly song with a pop chorus. They think it's girls and sh- Paul and I falsetto.

• 2:25:07Speaker 00

  Not sonically recorded well at all.

• 2:25:13Rick Rubin?

  Doctor Love! It's like the Supremes.

• 2:25:19Speaker 00

  And I knew one of them well.

• 2:25:22Rick Rubin?

  How did you meet Diana Ross?

• 2:25:26Speaker 00

  How did I meet Diana? I was... We were at a party in L.A. when the band decided to do four individual solo records and release all four solo records on the same day, which nobody had ever done before, during, or since. Kind of stupid, but they all turned platinum. But...

• 2:25:50Speaker 00

  So I was trying, I had this idea of filling up the solo record. Like, I remember the rock and roll circus thing. The Beatles or All You Need Is Love. They had everybody there, Jethro Tull and the Rolling Stones. And I loved that idea, that community of stuff. So I wanted to fill my solo record with all kinds of people you'd never think of. So as I would meet Helen Reddy, who at the time was the face of feminism. I am woman, treat me. Every girl was like singing that song. And Janice Ian, who I loved like crazy. There was a song called At Seventeen.

• 2:26:32Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm, beautiful song.

• 2:26:34Speaker 00

  Ugly ducklings like me, and what a song. And I remember seeing her when she was 14. She is down, can't get off the ground, before she was singing. So I wanted her, and all kinds of people showed up on that record. I reached out to Lennon McCartney, they were busy. Jerry Lee Lewis flew in, but too late to be on the record. Crazy Slick and Donna Summer and Rick Nielsen, everybody was on it. And I went to a government dinner. This guy Jerry Brown was running to be the governor of California. And he was there shaking hands, and he wanted to meet celebrities. And Cher was there.

• 2:27:16Speaker 00

  I had never met her and was a big fan, you know, Beat Goes On especially. Carole K. did that bass line. That became the hook. Carole K. sat me down, it's on YouTube, and showed me how if you got the right bass part, it is the song. You know, hit the road jackers, bum, bum, bum, bum. That's what you remember. So from her side, Chastity, her daughter at the time, said, oh my God, you're going to that party, Gene Simmons is gonna be there. Cher had never heard of me, she thought it was the actress, Gene Simmons.

• 2:27:55Rick Rubin?

  The old actress, 1940s, I think.

• 2:27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, she was married to Stuart Granger from Bo Bromwell, all that.

• 2:28:03Speaker 00

  And she walks up to me and she said, are you, are you Gene Simmons? And I go, yeah, nice to meet you and everything. And she sat down, we started talking and she said, let me tell you a funny story. And I said, you know, I'm a really big fan. Those songs meant a lot to me because I got you, babe, is a teenage survival story. You know, they say we're young, but we don't know that I got you, you got me. It was like this kind of surviving teenage love story. And I loved the lyric and the whole thing. And Sonny, as it turned out, wrote a lot of, a lot of songs with Phil Spector. And so I told her all that stuff. I knew about the wrecking crew and we, we talked all night.

• 2:28:48Speaker 00

  I, I asked her, do you want to be on my solo record? I'm doing a solo. And she said, yeah. And after the party, Cher asked me if I wanted to go with her. I didn't know where or anything, because my history is tainted, you know? So I hop in her limo and Marcia Strassman, who used to be on Mr. Cotter, a reality show, was Cher's best friend. Warn Cher, you don't want to go with this guy. I know all about him. Despite that fact, Cher and I went and I remember staying up all night at Cher's house and we were just talked about, you're from Israel? What the hell is that? They don't drink or smoke or get high?

• 2:29:33Speaker 00

  Because she was surrounded by that culture. It's Hollywood. So we very quickly started, she was on the record, she appeared, and we started living together for a few years. And then Christmas time came up and I told her, look, I'm going to New York. I got a recorder, two or not. What do I get you for Christmas? I don't know what to get you. She said, call my best friend, Diana Ross, she'll take you shopping and whatever she buys, you know, she'll know what I like. This is my best friend. I got to New York, I called Diana, and you know where this is going. And I'd never met her before. Of course, I was in awe, the Supremes and Diana Ross and Motown and all that.

• 2:30:19Speaker 00

  And I went up to her place and told her about you. She said, oh, no, Cher called me and I'm gonna take you shopping. And do you wanna eat anything? I, not so much. Food is okay, but I love cake. You like cake? Oh, yeah, I worship cake. Well, I've got some chocolate cake. You want some chocolate cake? I love it. She gave me a slice and then she gave me a second slice. Literally. And then we became a thing. We lived together or had a relationship on and off. And needless to say, Cher and Diana, you know, for a while, I think they're okay now.

• 2:31:04Speaker 00

  For a while, didn't speak with each other.

• 2:31:07Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the personality of Cher and the personality of Diana Ross.

• 2:31:17Speaker 00

  The DNA, it seems to me, is similar. Both women didn't suffer fools easily. Alpha females. A lot of women, and I've known a lot in the capital K biblical sense, use their femininity and their looks to get what they want. And fair enough, you use what tools you have. And both Cher and Diana, it seems to me, unlike almost any other females, did not define themselves by their men.

• 2:32:01Speaker 00

  Either in marriage or relationships or anything. They did what they wanted to do, which explains how they were able to climb so fast and stay for so many decades. And I don't care, you know, I will say whatever I want to say. I don't care about being canceled. Who likes me, who not? I honestly cannot say a bad thing about Cher or Diana. They're wonderful, wonderful.

• 2:32:28Speaker 00

  Exciting, mentally stimulating, and it's just great.

• 2:32:33Rick Rubin?

  What was the gift that you got for Cher?

• 2:32:35Speaker 00

  Not a fucking clue. I don't remember.

• 2:32:38Rick Rubin?

  You didn't remember?

• 2:32:38Speaker 00

  I don't shop well. It just means nothing to me. It's not that I don't appreciate it. Hey, every time there's a holiday, or birthday, or Christmas, my kids and Shannon, who I've been with for forty-one years,

• 2:32:55Speaker 00

  I always beg them, please don't buy me anything. It goes in a closet, or I give it away. I'm not a thing guy.

• 2:33:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:04Speaker 00

  I mean, I wear some loud clothes every now and then, but I never buy them.

• 2:33:09Rick Rubin?

  What do you remember about the album cover?

• 2:33:13Speaker 00

  I think it was Paul that had the title, Rock and Roll Over, because he liked the rollover kind of a thing.

• 2:33:18Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:33:18Speaker 00

  And it was Dennis Woolick, the art director at our business manager's, guy named Howard Marks' office, who had this idea that there's no up or down, that you could turn the record sideways or upside down, and it would also work. So he created that with an artist whose name I forgot, and it's become, you know, iconic beyond. I've seen many, many groups do that.

• 2:33:48Rick Rubin?

  It's so cool.

• 2:33:49Speaker 00

  And by the way, I'm proud to say that on the Kiss tribute album,

• 2:33:54Speaker 00

  we had everybody from Lenny Kravitz and Garth Brooks and everybody else. And I put together that record, so I'd be calling Neil Young, you know, talk to, say, hey, I want Neil to sing a song. You want Neil to be on a Kiss tribute album? How about you'll be on a Neil tribute album? I said, okay, Neil first, and then we'll do a song for that called Madonna's Off. I wanted her to do I Was Made For Loving You. That would be so cool.

• 2:34:20Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 2:34:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. I had White Zombie, and just everybody you can think of, and of course, Jimmy Iovine called and said, what are you doing? Talking to my acts directly. They're signed, you know, to me. I'm going, hey, rappers do it, bees do it, why can't we do it? So we were lucky to get the artists we got. And one of the tracks was Calling Dr. Love. Singing lead is Maynard, you know, from Tool and Perfect Circle. And on guitar is Tom Morello. And there were a lot of, so many cool people doing that. And it meant the world to me. Because they did it from the point of view of the music being a soundtrack of their lives. Because they grew up with it.

• 2:35:03Rick Rubin?

  I understand. The next album is the last album before the solo albums. And I will play you a song from that.

• 2:36:22Rick Rubin?

  So that's an example of a song where the riff is the hook.

• 2:36:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And there were quite enough of those. A lot of the songs were based around a riff, either like.

• 2:36:46Speaker 00

  That's got a thunder. Everybody's playing that riff. This one.

• 2:36:52Speaker 00

  Everybody would play the riff. Whether you mask it with soap. But yeah, riffs had a lot to do with it. And, you know, I'm reminded, my favorite band of all time. Sometimes you hear.

• 2:37:08Speaker 00

  That's the bass line, but it played with guitar. It sounds like horn lines. And the way I played bass. I tried to follow in the way behind and the, in the shadow and the footsteps of McCartney, who played bass more in the way a string quartet works, which is that.

• 2:37:31Speaker 00

  Unlike AC/DC, which is like if there's a song in A, the bass would go.

• 2:37:38Speaker 00

  You know, it'd go.

• 2:37:45Speaker 00

  I'm making it up. And underneath it would be. And the bass wouldn't move. It would be the railroad track. And they were maybe the best at doing that. And with the Beatles, you remembered the bass. You know.

• 2:38:03Speaker 00

  You know.

• 2:38:03Rick Rubin?

  Melodic bass lines.

• 2:38:04Speaker 00

  But yes, like a string quartet. The cello had its own melody.

• 2:38:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:09Speaker 00

  Even if the drums was doing a beat. And some of those McCartney, you know, Lady Madonna.

• 2:38:18Speaker 00

  The bass line.

• 2:38:23Speaker 00

  Whatever.

• 2:38:25Speaker 00

  You know, that thing. The whole song is a riff. And by the way, so is this.

• 2:38:35Speaker 00

  The bass doesn't do that, though. The bass does.

• 2:38:45Speaker 00

  Against this.

• 2:38:49Speaker 00

  It's a very strange thing. It's actually wrong.

• 2:38:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:53Speaker 00

  Because they wind up on the A.

• 2:38:55Rick Rubin?

  Worked out okay for them, though.

• 2:38:56Speaker 00

  Against a G, which is a passing dissonant.

• 2:39:05Rick Rubin?

  So this is the Love Gun album, and what... How would you say the band had changed from the beginning to Love Gun?

• 2:39:11Speaker 00

  We were selling out everywhere in stadiums and arenas and stuff. We had come back from Japan and Europe and...

• 2:39:22Speaker 00

  We had yet to play South America. When we went to South America, the first time in 1981 or so, we played Baracana, the largest stadium in the world. Anywhere from 175 to 200,000 people. And that was at the low point in the band. It was a local opening band, and that was it. And by that time, Ace was out of the band. We had at least 10 different lineups.

• 2:39:53Rick Rubin?

  Is that the first album, Love Gun, the first album, where it's not the original members?

• 2:39:57Speaker 00

  No. The original members were hanging in there, although we were having more and more problems with Ace and Peter. Demands and showing up late and not doing that. No, the band, we were riding high. The Gallup Poll, which used to mean a lot. We were the number one band in the world, per the Gallup Poll, for three years in a row: '77, '78, '79. Number two, I think, was Beatles. And then there was Led Zeppelin and Bee Gees and other bands. Unlike the other bands, some bands were selling more records. A few bands actually sold more tickets. But nobody touched us in licensing and merchandising. And we were making millions.

• 2:40:41Speaker 00

  So we went out and did another greatest hits collection called Double Platinum.

• 2:40:48Rick Rubin?

  When was Alive Two, though?

• 2:40:50Speaker 00

  Alive Two was right after Destroyer, Rockin' All Over, and Love Gun. Then Alive Two.

• 2:40:59Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 2:41:00Speaker 00

  Another three records, another Alive... Also, multi-platinum, creating new...

• 2:41:05Rick Rubin?

  I think that was, at the time, my favorite of your albums was just Alive Two.

• 2:41:10Speaker 00

  There were some good songs, Rockin' in the USA, All American Man, a few others. Ace Frehley did not show up for quite a few of those songs. So we got Bob Kulik, Rick Derringer, a few other people. And by that time, you know, cracks. Not all was well in paradise. And after Alive Two, we couldn't really get our act together. Peter Criss started to make problems. So in the meantime, right after that, we released double platinum, which was another greatest hits collection. You remember, our fans kept getting younger and younger. New fans, because of the toys and the games, were discovering the band. So they didn't know about the...

• 2:41:53Rick Rubin?

  The early records.

• 2:41:54Speaker 00

  No, they just like, oh, double album.

• 2:41:57Rick Rubin?

  And it was a really cool cover, it was silver, yes?

• 2:41:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:42:00Rick Rubin?

  Like mirror-like.

• 2:42:01Speaker 00

  The imprint mirrored... By the way, copied from Uriah Heep. They had an album that was called Mirror Images or something, where the faces were imprinted. You know, everybody gets inspired or everything. And we did a disco version of Strutters. It was Strutter 79 or something. And just same song, just... That kind of thing, which didn't work at all on the double platinum. So but on Alive Two, millions flew out the door. But there was trouble in paradise, both Ace and Peter. And during that time, we did a movie that was in theaters, drive-in theaters.

• 2:42:45Speaker 00

  We caught it in Australia, when we went back. Outdoors, packed with cars everywhere. We replaced Peter first, whose drumming went down. We used to call him Mr. Misery, or the Ayatollah Criscola.

• 2:43:04Speaker 00

  That was his original name. I was Gene the Nazarene. Oh, I want to grow up to be just like you. You're so important, you know, that thing. And Paul was the he-she. Screw it on. Sometimes he's a he's a. There was a thing in the media. They thought Paul pitched for the other side or was secretly a woman, you know, whatever, all that stuff, nonsense. And Ace was High Octane and other such names. But clearly Ace and Peter were having problems. And I always feel the pain that fans must feel.

• 2:43:44Speaker 00

  I mean, my heart was broken when I heard Lennon going on about, you never wrote anything except. Like, oh, my God, you were childhood friends. Heartbreaking. When they turn on each other, you go, what? Don't, Mom and Dad, you know, when they turn on each other. So I'm aware of it. So we had to get rid of Peter and Eric Carr, who cleans stoves in Westchester. It was Eric Caravello. We changed to Carr. So it didn't sound like Mr. Bunchka Loop selling fruit on a street corner. Hey, get your fruit over here, Caravello. It's just not a rock sounding name.

• 2:44:28Speaker 00

  Jews change their name. Nobody was born Bob Dylan, okay? On the other hand, nobody was born The Edge. I think I'm gonna call my baby The Edge. And new members came and went. Eric was great, a real team player, and sadly passed. He got a rare form of cancer and he passed quickly, very, very fast. And then Ace, during the filming of the

• 2:45:03Speaker 00

  Kiss Meets the Phantom film, he wouldn't show up. Also, Peter wouldn't show up on Sundays. We had to get stuntmen. There was an African American stuntman who dressed up in his thing so he could do the stunts and everything. And Ace was nowhere to be found. God knows where he went. And this film was big. And we started doing an album called Creatures of the Night. Before then, we had another greatest hits album called Killers with four new songs, and they all kept selling. And then we hit rock bottom with Creatures of the Night in America.

• 2:45:43Speaker 00

  And I co-wrote a song called War Machine with a new guy who had a hit record, but they sped up and they thought it was a girl, Bryan Adams. I had the riff, and he and Jimmy Valance finished the song.

• 2:45:58Speaker 00

  And then I wrote I Love It Loud, you know, kind of like, this is what we're about, kind of like an anthem thing, which is still one of the songs which has been sampled by rap groups and all that. And the record came out, and it was a bomb. Two hundred and fifty thousand albums, something like that, where we were multiple millions. And at the same time, we went to South America and played the largest shows we'd ever played. If you can imagine Anaheim Stadium, four times the size. So much so that the spotlights around the audience were airplane landing lights

• 2:46:39Speaker 00

  because regular spotlights didn't reach the stage. Unbelievable. They would dissipate. And we were trapped in our hotel rooms. It was mania, and the army was our... So we went to armored personnel carriers with tank treads, and we're inside looking through peepholes. To see outside, somebody was run over, nobody stopped, they just, it was insane. We played three outdoor shows, and then when we left, the promoter, God bless him, absconded, took our equipment, and it took a court case, hey, it's South America.

• 2:47:20Rick Rubin?

  Took your equipment?

• 2:47:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, because he thought we should have paid less, or we paid too much, or whatever that is, but, you know, we went to court and got everything back, but it's, you know, it's the Wild West, it's South America, and again, at the same time, we came back after having played the biggest shows we'd ever played, so in certain parts of the world, and it's the same with any band that lasts long enough, you can't get on a plane without getting turbulence, of course, you get more turbulence in the back than you do in the front, and we had new members, Mark St. John came and left, and Bruce Kulik came, and

• 2:48:05Speaker 00

  it was Paul who came to me and said, you know, we're doing good stuff, Creatures of the Night was a decent record, it had some good tunes on it, maybe it's time to take the makeup off.

• 2:48:18Rick Rubin?

  Wow, interesting.

• 2:48:19Speaker 00

  I thought I'd be lost without it, because that became so ingrained, I knew who and what I was, and it, you know, it's like, what's Dr. Jekyll without Mr. Hyde?

• 2:48:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:32Speaker 00

  It was just the doctor.

• 2:48:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:36Speaker 00

  And we had a guy named Waring Abbott, a photographer, we had a confidential photo shoot, where nobody would get copies, and we stood around without our makeup, and we were writing songs, pretty good, with new members, the Lick It Up record came out, and we hit again, went right back up without makeup, you know, less is more.

• 2:49:01Rick Rubin?

  Was there an Unmasked album? Is it called Unmasked?

• 2:49:04Speaker 00

  Before. Unmasked came after I Was Made For Loving You and Dynasty.

• 2:49:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:11Speaker 00

  And Peter Criss, that was his last record. He got credit for it. He didn't play a single hit.

• 2:49:17Rick Rubin?

  I Was Made For Loving You is a really good song.

• 2:49:18Speaker 00

  Anton Figg from The Letterman Show, who was in another band called Spider, that a coin managed as well. And he was a good, solid drummer. He played secretly.

• 2:49:30Rick Rubin?

  Did a coin manage you guys the whole time?

• 2:49:34Speaker 00

  Yes. And shortly after that, by eighty-three, we stopped being managed by him. And later on, he got sick. He passed away unfortunately from AIDS. He just wouldn't go to the doctor. Just awful, awful. And then our business manager took over business management, but no manager. We were managing ourselves.

• 2:49:58Rick Rubin?

  Was there a period of time, though, with Doc McGee or no?

• 2:50:00Speaker 00

  Doc McGee is, after we decided to put the makeup back on again in ninety-four, ninety-five, after all kinds of records, sold-out tours. We even played stadiums without the makeup. It was surprising. We didn't expect it, but still, The Kiss, it's like Kiss without makeup, with effects and pyro and stagecraft.

• 2:50:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:26Speaker 00

  And it worked fine. New generations ate it up. It was great. And then we did the Kiss Conventions. And I hired a guy named Tommy Thayer, who was in a band called Black and Blue. They asked me to produce their last two albums, which I did. And I recognized a talented guitar player and a professional, who shows up on time, makes lists, checks it twice and all that stuff. It's so important in a band.

• 2:50:58Speaker 00

  And hired him to do whatever had to be done. So he became our old manager. We put together Kiss history books at my guesthouse, sold it direct to the fans, no retail. They sent cash. We made millions. You know, all the publishers went, why didn't I? I came to you. You didn't believe in it. So we had two, Volume One and Volume Two, and they were enormously successful.

• 2:51:24Speaker 00

  And then, right after that, we did the Kiss conventions. I think it was my idea. The idea being that fans can never get close enough. And in those days, a hundred dollar ticket was crazy. So we would take over the ballrooms of hotels, which often they'd give us for free because they wanted the traffic, the food, fans staying over. And we called local Kiss tribute bands who would play there. And we would take Plexiglas collectibles and just showcase it. And onstage, say, what do you want to hear? Here's a song acoustically. So there was no big stage show. Question and answer, like a real fan thing.

• 2:52:08Speaker 00

  They were very successful and...

• 2:52:10Rick Rubin?

  And you did that all over, not just in one place?

• 2:52:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:52:13Rick Rubin?

  Interesting.

• 2:52:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. And MTV got wind of it, said we'd like to do one in New York and record it. And we did. That became the Unplugged, Kiss Unplugged thing with Ace and Peter and Eric Singer, who was in the band, and Bruce Kulik. And it was like six guys, two original guys and that stuff. And it was very successful, big record and all that stuff. And the audience was packed with a white zombie, an anthrax guy, or this guy, you know, because they grew up with the stuff. And Paul and I looked at each other, saying, you know, Ace and Peter aren't in too bad of a shape. They look like they're clean.

• 2:52:58Speaker 00

  And so we looked at each other and said, do you want to try a reunion? You know, we talked to them. There were still some vestiges of demands. I want this, I want that. And they agreed to it. And at that point, I was booking some stuff and doing... You know, we didn't have a manager. And we looked in the, in essence, the phone book and interviewed a few managers. Madonna's manager, this guy's manager. And Bon Jovi and Motley Crue happened to have this guy, Doc McGee. And we took both of those bands out on their first tours.

• 2:53:41Speaker 00

  And we liked McGee, what he had to say. And also, it was a very hard negotiation. I think I was the asshole and said, "You can't take from the gross. You can only take from the net after all costs. You gotta have some skin in the game." And he agreed, and we put the thing together. And in short order, the reunion tour became the number one tour, gallupled stadiums, the whole thing. The very first show was Tiger Stadium, which went clean in 45 minutes. And more and more, Ace and Peter started to fall back. Some people can kick the stuff,

• 2:54:23Speaker 00

  and I'm not qualified, but some people can't. Either self-esteem issues, or life isn't going their way. Or even if it is going their way, you're rich and famous. What's the problem? No, I think I've gotta numb myself and become dependent. I never understood it. I don't understand the appeal. And I'm told if you drink too much, your schmeckel won't work. And why the fuck would you want that? Think about it. You will throw up on your girlfriend's shoes, which she just bought. Next morning, you have a headache, and your schmeckel won't work. What is that?

• 2:55:04Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the Last Kiss show.

• 2:55:08Speaker 00

  We kept talking about the end. Because we were acutely aware, basically, Paul and I, as fans of this thing, this culture, this thing. Because say what you will about classical music, I don't see a culture, a Ten Commandments of what it all means. Renaissance was a freeing of creativity. But country is a culture. It's how you dress, how you talk, what you believe in, church, your truck, your beard, all these kind of things.

• 2:55:52Speaker 00

  Hip-hop, for sure. So we were aware of...

• 2:55:58Speaker 00

  Boxers and bands staying in the ring too long.

• 2:56:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:03Speaker 00

  Cause you just can't.

• 2:56:04Rick Rubin?

  And you've done it 50 years, just to be clear.

• 2:56:07Speaker 00

  But you're still, look at me.

• 2:56:10Rick Rubin?

  I know.

• 2:56:10Speaker 00

  Come on, Ruben.

• 2:56:11Rick Rubin?

  I know, and the people show up.

• 2:56:12Speaker 00

  And they show up.

• 2:56:13Rick Rubin?

  They show up happy.

• 2:56:15Speaker 00

  I know I'd be popular in jail. I got it. There are a lot of, there are a lot of people my age.

• 2:56:22Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 2:56:22Speaker 00

  I'm 75, who would, you know, walking around with their walkers.

• 2:56:28Speaker 00

  It bears noting that Mick Jagger, I think, is a little older than Joe Biden.

• 2:56:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:33Speaker 00

  And he's doing two hour shows, running around on stage.

• 2:56:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:36Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't want to say.

• 2:56:37Rick Rubin?

  Not age.

• 2:56:38Speaker 00

  Part of it is DNA, your genes. And part of it is kind of like the joy of life. I've met, you know, I've met 60 year olds who act like they're 100.

• 2:56:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:50Speaker 00

  It is a mindset. When I wake up in the morning, it's just like, wow, look at this stuff. So Paul and I were talking about Peter Chris and Ace, they came back in the band. And by 2000, we did Dodger Stadium and this and that, all kinds of cool stuff. New Year's Eve, Dick Clark and all that and sold more records and a lot more licensing and merchandising. And we're talking about cartoons and movies and all that. And both Peter and Ace back in the band was just torture.

• 2:57:30Speaker 00

  Sadly, they were both in and out of the band three different times. How many times does life give you a chance to earn millions and millions and?

• 2:57:40Rick Rubin?

  And play music.

• 2:57:42Speaker 00

  And play music and have the time of your life and not worry about stuff. Just, you know, live the life of Riley, as they say. And

• 2:57:51Speaker 00

  we thought, you know, the very last show of that tour, we gotta get rid of the guys. And we thought, New Year's Eve, let's just end it. Cause you can't.

• 2:58:03Speaker 00

  You can drive with some flat tires, but it's not convincing. And Cartney's still out there, that's great. Very few people his age should be on that stage. There's he, and bless BB King, he went out on stage, sitting down. But rock is a certain thing, you gotta be on two legs. You gotta do something. If you're not running around, at least something. So, we decided, you know, go out while you're on top. Go out when the story is good. And we were gonna end 2000. Once Ace and Peter left for the third time.

• 2:58:44Speaker 00

  And we took some time off and everything. And then the fans kept asking, "Why'd you stop?"

• 2:58:51Speaker 00

  Well, Ace and Peter no longer... While you got on without them, with different members, we took the makeup off and everything. We came to see you and you sold out everywhere and your records were good. And we started to look at each other like, "Yeah, what about that?" And, you know, the fire in the belly was relit. Do we dare hope against hope that we can... I mean, how many years do you think you can last here with new generations? Hair metal bands and grunge and new romance and Adam and the Ants. You know, all the new kinds of things. How can you stay relevant? And maybe, or just popular? Forget about relevance.

• 2:59:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:33Speaker 00

  And we got new guys. Tommy Thayer, who was in Black and Blue, was also in a Kiss tribute band called Cold Gin.

• 2:59:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:45Speaker 00

  And they did so well that they actually toured Japan as a Kiss tribute band and get, I don't know, 20, 30, 40,000 bucks per night. Made a good living being a Kiss tribute band. And he knew all the songs and physically looked like Ace.

• 3:00:01Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever seen a Kiss tribute band?

• 3:00:03Speaker 00

  Many.

• 3:00:04Rick Rubin?

  What's that like?

• 3:00:07Speaker 00

  Bizarre.

• 3:00:09Speaker 00

  And you can also see little people kiss tribute bands. There's Mini Kiss and oh yeah, there's all female Kiss called Priss and a few other variations. It's really quite amazing. There's Gene's Addiction, which is a Seattle band made up of Green River and some of the Seattle bands you'd know. And all of them are dressed like me. And when one of them spits fire, all five guys dressed like me spit fire at the same time, including the drummer. I'm not making it up. I wore the Gene's Addiction, get it?

• 3:00:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:48Speaker 00

  Gene's Addiction t-shirt for the longest time. And then when Maynard and Morello did the track on Kiss My Ass, they called it Shandy's Addiction. Shandy was a pop song Paul wrote on one of the records, which was a hit in Australia. So we took a look at this idea of we were born in New York City, 10 East 23rd Street.

• 3:01:15Speaker 00

  10 blocks down, 10 from 33rd Street, Madison Square Garden. So we decided, let's finish off Christmas or Kissmas. 50 years after the birth of the band, 10 blocks down, let's do it at New York and only do one show. And film it and all that stuff and invite our friends. You know, it'll be like a celebration. And then the film crew and everybody in McGee convinced us to do two shows. We could have been there for a week or 10 days.

• 3:01:50Rick Rubin?

  Better for the film to shoot more than one.

• 3:01:52Speaker 00

  Well, also you don't know if a microphone's not going to work or you get a flat tire or whatever. So we did December 1, December 2 in New York. But by the way, like all things Kiss, the Empire State Building lit up with our faces on it. There were 800 New York City cabs wrapped around with Kiss imagery. If you went into the subway and you got a subway ticket, you had our faces on the subways. You went to get a pizza, the outside of the pizza boxes, we were our faces in your face. There were Kiss pop-up shops. Basically, if you started a new religion and called it Christianity, that's what was going on. It was like a total takeover.

• 3:02:35Rick Rubin?

  What year was this?

• 3:02:38Speaker 00

  This last December.

• 3:02:39Rick Rubin?

  Wow, amazing.

• 3:02:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were, we just couldn't believe it.

• 3:02:45Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 3:02:47Speaker 00

  Anywhere we went, I mean, there were people walking around the streets of New York during the daytime because fans flew in from around the world, Japanese fans and all that stuff during the daytime in full makeup, you know, it'd be, we'd be going in our, going to the Empire State Building because we went up to the top where King Kong fell off and all that stuff. Because in seventy six, we were on top taking photos when there were no guardrails hanging off the sides. It's one of those photos that became a thing. And on the way there, we were seeing Kiss people on the streets.

• 3:03:21Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 3:03:22Speaker 00

  You know, dressing early to go to the show.

• 3:03:24Rick Rubin?

  Feel any different onstage, knowing it was the last one?

• 3:03:27Speaker 00

  Very emotional.

• 3:03:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:30Speaker 00

  Pride, but also a little sad because

• 3:03:39Speaker 00

  people who've been married, I'm guessing, a few times, but remember when it was real love and that magic of the thing. If it doesn't last, there's a sadness there. Sometimes it's drugs and alcohol. Sometimes they just go apart. But when it was great, it's sad because not everybody survives life.

• 3:04:02Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 3:04:04Speaker 00

  And I'm still sad about Ace and Peter, who

• 3:04:09Speaker 00

  even today can't enjoy the fruits of their labor. They were equally as important as Paul and myself in the formation of the band and those first few years. There's no question about it. It was a four-wheel drive vehicle. And then the air started coming out of two of the wheels to the point where, as a matter of fact, when it was time for Peter to go, Ace voted, no, he's got to go. He can't play the drums anymore. And then Ace, using his words, walked out of Kiss, even though he said, you can stay in Kiss, have a solo career. We don't want a penny of it. Have your cake and eat it too. And he said to

• 3:04:52Speaker 00

  my face, no, I can't stay in the band. He said it in print, if I do another tour, I'm going to kill myself.

• 3:05:01Speaker 00

  That's verbatim, and I didn't understand what that meant. I didn't want to get into it. And then he said, "You watch, I'm gonna sell 10 million records." I can't respond to that, I don't know what that meant. Especially with, you know, logically, stay in the band, have your cake, eat it too.

• 3:05:24Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 3:05:26Speaker 00

  So, what an amazing journey. And strangely and magically, and the both shows were terrific. And people were crying, you have people of all ages. We had the lump, you know, on the throat. You'd look around and my poor mother didn't make it. She lived to be 94 years old. But every time we played in New York with her thick Hungarian accent, she'd elbow whoever was next to her, you know, "That's my sunny boy." Oh, my God, I just don't get me started. And she'd be doing my, you know, my hand signal along with everybody else in broken English, "Rock and roll, rock and roll," you know, all that stuff.

• 3:06:10Speaker 00

  And singing, "I want to rock and roll all night," you know.

• 3:06:14Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 3:06:17Speaker 00

  What an amazing mom I had. She's with me every day. And the very end of both of those shows, we had made a deal with a company called Pop House, who bought ABBA rights and put on this Avatar ABBA show in London, which got millions of people going.

• 3:06:40Rick Rubin?

  It's incredible, I've seen it, incredible.

• 3:06:43Speaker 00

  And whatever technology you saw there is now primitive. They are investing untold amounts, I don't want to say anything, more than...

• 3:06:55Speaker 00

  You know what virtual reality is when you put those glasses on? And you would swear your life that the ground just opened up. And you have a chasm and you're falling in free fall. And you have this sense that what you're seeing is real. And by the way, all around you. Right? No matter where you look, up, down, stuff, your, your sense of reality. Now imagine that without glasses.

• 3:07:23Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 3:07:24Speaker 00

  And I've seen it.

• 3:07:25Rick Rubin?

  And when will that be?

• 3:07:28Speaker 00

  By 2027. It's just so much exciting stuff. So in a lot of ways, entertainment itself and life itself is changing dramatically with AI and technology and all this stuff. There will still be room for live bands, playing live with the blues and all that. There's no substitute for that. But in other areas, the sky's the limit, no limit.

• 3:07:57Rick Rubin?

  Can I play you a song from your solo album?

• 3:08:00Speaker 00

  Which one? I got two.

• 3:08:02Rick Rubin?

  This one.

• 3:08:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:08:08Speaker 00

  With the American Symphony Orchestra, all wearing

• 3:08:12Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 3:08:12Speaker 00

  jean masks.

• 3:08:13Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 3:10:33Speaker 00

  On a solo record, the rest of the guys were smart. Peter Notzlmot, Peter was doing R&B covers, which were not convincing and stuff. But Ace especially, just went to his roots and did what he knew.

• 3:10:47Rick Rubin?

  Back in the New York groove, it was a good one.

• 3:10:50Speaker 00

  Which was a cover by the Arrows, I think it was.

• 3:10:54Rick Rubin?

  I didn't know that.

• 3:10:55Speaker 00

  Yes. It was Eddie Kramer, who said, "Why don't we do that song?" And it still played in Yankee baseball games and everything. It was a big hit. Paul likewise did a rock record with guitars and everything. I wanted, because I'd written so many songs, so many different styles. So there are ballads on it. There are symphony orchestras, there's things. And when I was 12 years old, I went to see Pinocchio. And I told you I was delusional. I didn't have brothers or sisters. I had a lot of time on my own. Read comic books and all about fantasy and science fiction.

• 3:11:34Speaker 00

  The 5,000 fingers of Dr. T, all this stuff that I just loved. And when I saw the big Disney animated movie, and Little Jiminy Cricket steps up.

• 3:11:50Speaker 00

  That's another one of those perfect songs. It's called "When You Wish Upon a Star." Here's how it starts. "When you wish upon a..." Right at the top, I'm going, "Oh, my God." At 12, I didn't know anything about anything. When Jiminy Cricket, this animated little cricket, steps up and looks into the camera and starts singing. Larger-than-life, I thought he was singing only to me, like a magic friend. "Your dreams come true." I went out of that movie theater like I was touched by Jesus. You know, I don't worship the guy. I think he's a good guy, but I went like... It was a religious experience.

• 3:12:34Speaker 00

  I remember that feeling of being inspired, that you could be anybody and your dreams can come true.

• 3:12:43Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 3:12:44Speaker 00

  That's an amazing thing, because other songs didn't have that.

• 3:12:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:48Speaker 00

  "When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true." And I, when I finally did my solo record, I rented the Concord chair and the kids and the nannies flew with me. We recorded it at Oxford Studios down the street from George Harrison and Eric Clapton. And all the big bands were there. And I flew over all the best musicians, you know, who played. I played guitar on the record, not bass, because I wanted to and I could have whatever I want.

• 3:13:19Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 3:13:19Speaker 00

  And I had all kinds of stars on the record, singing backgrounds. Donna Summer singing with me on "Burning Up with Fever", which she was gonna cover. And Georgia Marotta said, "No, you're not gonna do a Gene Simmons song."

• 3:13:34Speaker 00

  But all kinds of crazy stuff, which goes against the, quote, "rules." If you're in a rock band, you don't wanna have Helen Reddy on the up. I didn't care. I wanted to. I always wanted to.

• 3:13:44Rick Rubin?

  You wanted to do what you wanted to do.

• 3:13:45Speaker 00

  That's what it's supposed to be about.

• 3:13:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:48Speaker 00

  I wanted to have Lassie Barking. I wanted to have the New York City Rockettes tap dancing on "Living in Sin" at the Holiday Inn, which I wrote. And I was making, I was wanting to record onstage at Radio City Music Hall. Symphony Orchestra to do these big symphonic things. They also played on "Man of a Thousand Faces." I wrote "Before Kiss" as an homage to my hero Lon Chaney Senior, who invented...

• 3:14:18Speaker 00

  Makeup and hunchback of Notre Dame fat. And he invented and created the flared nostrils, plastics, which nobody had done before. And I was so fascinated by the guy whose mother and father were deaf and dumb. They had to communicate with sign language. And that's why he was such a great actor in silent films, where you couldn't do anything except physically express anything. In fact, the image of me onstage with that thing is all Lon Chaney Senior from London After Midnight. Photos of him, because there's not a print remaining of that original film about a vampire at night, including the bat wings. It's all Lon Chaney Senior.

• 3:15:05Speaker 00

  And so I had to do "When You Wish Upon a Star." I couldn't sing it. The guy that sang it was Ned Washington, I'm pretty sure, who may have written it. I have such a heartwarming song when you hear the original. When you wish... I'm going, oh, my God. I don't have that kind of voice. And I remember being in the sound booth in England and in America, Cherokee Studios, because we had to do overdubs and stuff, and I had to plug in everything, crying my heart out, because it took me back to the 12-year-old kid

• 3:15:48Speaker 00

  watching Pinocchio on 83rd Street and Northern Boulevard in Queens, going to the movie theater alone. I saved up, I don't remember, 59 cents, whatever it cost. Nobody goes anywhere alone, but I didn't have brothers or sisters. And I was 12. I didn't have dates or anything. My mother was always working, and my father was not around. He ran out on us.

• 3:16:17Speaker 00

  And alone in that movie theater, I had...

• 3:16:22Speaker 00

  A semi-religious experience.

• 3:16:26Speaker 00

  The music and the visuals, but the message.

• 3:16:29Rick Rubin?

  Your dreams can come true.

• 3:16:32Speaker 00

  And they have. Makes no difference who you are. It says that in the lyric. Me? Because how dare? How dare? You're nobody. You're speaking hello, but not to say, you know, you speak with an accent. You come from nowhere. No, that doesn't matter. Your dreams can come true is an astonishing message. I had to do it.

• 3:17:23Speaker 06

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